ten red hen

merge night #1, or, What the Hell Happened to Conor Oberst?

2009-07-23T06:46:00.000-07:00

We're at the Merge Records fest. The shows start at 7pm and go til 2am every morning.
Notable about night #1.

Conor Oberst is looking:
(a) like a fucking rock-out-with-your-cock-out country-inflected rock STAR. Not an indie rock star. Gone is the painfully shy, emo twee boy of the past who sang as if every note was torn from his body. Oberst has fully immersed himself in Mick Jagger's famous bag of male rock star performance tricks--with not a few more ripped from young angry Johnny Cash.

He strutted and howled and spit and preened and stumbled and sneered and rambled and gesticulated wildly to clarify every punch of the lyrics and banging his head hard hard hard with every chord chord chord. He ripped off Jack White's wardrobe (absurd black cowboy hat, check--Native American man-jewelry, check). He rocked big stadium Bon Jovi musical transitions that you don't usually see in a 300 person indie club--the hard switch from one song right into another, cutting out the band for a beat to yowl out a line against the silence.

And I have to say, it was absolutely electrifying. We had been at the Cradle at that point for seven fucking hours. I was feeling pretty done by the time the penultimate band, the Rosebuds, came on--we were going to stay and see Conor do his thing for a minute, and before I knew it, Lauren and I were staring at each other in disbelief and getting drawn into pushing our way into the front of the crowd and shaking our booties and taking pictures with our phone cameras.

Potentially explaining (a), Conor is also looking:
(b) Like he's doing some serious drugs. He was wasted drunk, but still pretty, um, energetic, up to the last chord, even for the 1/3 of the audience left. It was the final night of a pretty grueling two month tour, but he was noticeably Dracula-paler and unhealthy looking next to every other member of his Mystic River Band (a bunch of matching brunette boys with impressive musical chops who also all look like they're twelve).

Ah well. I guess LA got to him at some point.

Other things:
Lou Barlow is totally sounding like Cat Stevens doing confessional, and it's pretty wonderful.

I enjoyed the Magnetic Fields unreservedly and wholeheartedly for the first time ever.

awards and degrees

2009-03-24T12:16:00.000-07:00

If you know me, you know I'll undermine myself endlessly, but to hell with it: today I'm enjoying the fact that VERA WILDE won Bay Area Critics Circle Awards for Best Male Performer, Best Ensemble, Best Set and Best Score, along with our nominations for Best Female Performer. I'm especially proud of the ensemble, (Sean Owens, Alexandra Creighton, Danielle Levin, Tyler Kent and Ned Brauer), they did such outstanding work to make the show tick.

In other news, you know how I said I was done with theater? Boy howdy, I meant it (at least for now). This fall, I'll be starting my MFA in Studio Art. I'm deciding between two great programs, and am very, very excited to spend three years focused on making work, after which point I will be able to teach and have a much bigger tool-kit.

art and entertainment

2009-02-23T11:36:00.001-08:00

I've been trying to write about this moment for a week now--but it's just thought in process and doesn't really land anywhere.

I have been thinking a lot about the professions of art vs. entertainment--between the Oscars, and attending a wedding chock-full of comedy writers, and watching hours and hours (and hours) of reality TV on the flights to New York and back (Iron Chef America: Challenge King Crab, Chopped, Confessions of a Teen Idol, the Amazing Race, Made, and Celebrity Sober House). Also seeing Candice Breitz' incredible video piece Him and Her at the Yvon Lambert Gallery, a seven-channel installation in which 30 years worth of Meryl Streeps talk to each other about love, marriage, gender, art-making--a brilliant survey of the subconscious of cinema when it comes to presenting women. (I can't link directly to the piece--go to the website, click "video", then "Him and Her," then "Her.")

I am in no way "above" entertainment. I enjoy my celebrity gossip, and (when it's good), I am passionate for big fluffy musicals and trashy romance novels and stand-up comedy and America's Best Dance Crew and So You Think You Can Dance. I blobbed out shamelessly on JetBlue. In terms of the figures who influenced me, whom I think of as my ancestors in my pursuits, it comes down to old vaudeville, burlesque, comedy, people who created in big volume and wanted to entertain. And I know that one funny 2-minute sketch on the Daily Show reaches a bigger audience than probably all the stuff I've ever done put together.

So why? Why did I go one way and not the other?

It's funny to think about all of us who did high school theater, and are now involved in different types of creative work which might seem, to outsiders, like it floats in the same pond. When it only becomes more different, the more deeply we pursue whichever direction we struck out on.

waltz with bashir

2009-02-19T11:59:00.000-08:00

I doubt I can say anything about it that's new and fresh about Waltz with Bashir--an animated documentary about Israel, Lebanon, war, PTSD, and the subjectivity of memory creation and retention. All I can say is, go see it, and trust the wry humor that you might sense is in there--it's in there.

But I saw an interview with Ari Folman in the dentist's office, and thought I'd link to it. His five favorite movies. Mostly for the money quote:

"When I was a kid, my mother told my sisters and me that there were no superheroes except for ."

oh my god! i'm like, so fat!

2009-02-18T16:16:00.001-08:00

Someone, Gawker, anyone, talk about how fucking stupid this article is in Vanity Fair. First person navel-gazing (literally) "journalism" at its worst.

Here's my summary, in the voice of the author:

I'm a 27-year old, 5'9", 120 pound writer for Vanity Fair! I go to three plastic surgeons so they can tell me that I'm hot and don't need plastic surgery! But then one of them recommends minor lipo, so I'll never be able to eat a piece of fruit again without thinking about my fat ass [that last part is almost a direct quotataion]!

There is no part of me that is thinking critically about this, or as if feminism had ever happened! I just did this so I can have a full photo of me in sexy black underwear, looking hot, in Vanity Fair!

This is really an article about being reassured by professionals that I have a hot body, because I am that insecure! But also, I'm calling it journalism, so I can get paid for it! This is my most read article, ever! I'm so glad I could find an opportunity to whore myself before I turn 30!

Arts in the Stimulus Bill

2009-02-13T10:48:00.000-08:00

If anyone is interested, the full searchable PDF of the stimulus is here.

NATIONAL FOUNDATION ON THE ARTS AND THE HUMANITIES
NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS
GRANTS AND ADMINISTRATION
For an additional amount for ‘‘Grants and Administration’’, $50,000,000, to be distributed in direct grants to fund arts projects and activities which preserve jobs in the non-profit arts sector threatened by declines in philanthropic and other support during the current economic downturn: Provided, That 40 percent of such funds shall be distributed to State arts agencies and regional arts organizations in a manner similar to the agency’s current practice and percent of such funds shall be for competitively selected arts projects and activities according to sections 2 and 5(c) of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 951, 954(c)): Provided further, That matching requirements under section 5(e) of such Act shall be waived: Provided further, That the amount set aside from this appropriation pursuant to section 1106 of this Act shall be not more than 5 percent instead of the percentage specified in such section.

Glad to see the Arts weren't entirely forgotten. On a lighter note, from a friend:

Out of curiosity, I searched for the words "swimming pool" and was somewhat relieved to find this language on page 12:

None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available in this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, or swimming pool.

13 most beautiful...

2009-02-05T09:34:00.000-08:00

Went with B. to see Dean and Britta do the 13 Most Beautiful... (playing songs they scored to 13 of Andy Warhol's screen tests). I don't think I'd ever seen any of the screen tests, certainly not in their fullness. Very deceptively simple setup, but so gorgeous, so revealing. Andy was certainly an illustrator, he had an eye for light and shadow, and the "performers" were entirely masks. Masks--no person underneath. Unselfconscious glittering hard masks. And what was "beautiful" then would never make it now. Tyranny of authenticity gets in the way.

too much radiolab makes the brain go...

2009-02-05T09:30:00.000-08:00

So now that I've discovered RadioLab (years after everyone else has, as per usual with me), I'm working my way through the back catalogue. In the show on memory, they posit that re-membering is a creative act--we aren't calling up some true essential moment that exists somewhere in our brain, we are creating a past moment anew. And the more we recall up that memory, the less true it is, the less "real".

Ever since listening to that, I try not to remember or recall or sit in memories that are precious to me, so that I don't corrupt them with each subsequent copy.

notes from louise bourgeois

2009-01-23T10:49:00.001-08:00

I am kicking myself that I missed her retrospective at the Guggenheim this past summer (we were in NY for a wedding! We could have seen it!). Flying to London or Paris to see it at the Tate or Pompidou isn't really an option--so I took advantage of some expiring Southwest credits to see the abbreviated version at the downtown MoCA.

Notes:

LB's Poeta en Nueva York moment, a small chap book of parable poems/engravings called He Disappeared Into Compete Silence:

"Once there was a girl and she loved a man.
They had a date next to the eighth street station of the sixth avenue subway.
She put on her good clothes and a new hat. Somehow he could not come. So the purpose of this picture is to show how beautiful she was. I really mean that she was beautiful."

"Once a man was telling a story, it was a very good story too, and it made him very happy, but he told it so fast that nobody understood it."

On a piece called "Persistent Antagonism": "The macho bit is irritating. I have nothing against the penis. It is the wearer of the penis."
From "Personages": "Separate sections function as antannae as if the piece has an internal 'radar' which makes it sensitive to its surroundings."
Spider as metaphor for matriarch: weaving, trapping prey, eating, laying eggs, protecting web
Directness of imagery:

a guillotine hangs over a beautifully sculpted in pink marble rendering of her childhood home.
prosthetic leg as symbol of emotional disability
hybrid eye/vagina

Unashamed of presentation of self:

when afraid, Bourgeois often identifies with animals
self portrait as gargoyle with multiple breasts
dinner table with oppressive father's remains, being eaten by his children
nails in the heart of an old enemy
a woman's upper half enclosed in a house--lower half naked--woman doesn't realize what she is trying to conceal is what is exposed

Finally:

"It is not so much
where my motivation
comes from
but rather
how it manages
to survive"

in these troubled times, great news (orgs)

2009-01-23T10:35:00.000-08:00

Some news orgs seem to be thriving and doing some outstanding work.

St. Petersburg Times:
Who knew that something other than freaky news stories comes out of Florida? I was a fan of their Flip-O-Meter during the election, and now, the Truth-O-Meter.

KPCC, 89.3, Los Angeles:
I was extremely, but extremely, impressed at their fresh, detailed (but accessible) news coverage that ranges effortlessly from the local to national: from corrupt Orange County police chiefs to the California State budget deadlock to the closing of Guantanamo, all up to the minute. Clearly it has some clout as a news org: the politicians almost ran on to (State Republicans fell all over themselves getting their word out; Jane Harman literally left the interview for a minute to run in, cast a vote, and run back on.)

for the love of pageantry

2009-01-21T11:21:00.000-08:00

Big fancy ceremonies and pomp just thrills me. But of course this event meant more than most: I don't know why I would share such a thing, but these are the things that made me bawl:

Pete Seeger, looking like a mischevious old commie elf, God love him, singing those particular worker verses from "This Land Is Your Land"
Elizabeth Alexander reading her beautiful poem--reading it like a poet, not soaring on emotional or rhetorical vagueness, but giving each word its due.
And, ok, watching Beyonce croon "At Last" to the First Couple on their first dance. Even B was overcome.

Also, from the day: I couldn't turn away from the TV and start my day until I saw Bush not only get onto the helicopter, but fly away.

tyranny of authenticity

2009-01-14T14:49:00.000-08:00

Ellen Sebastian Chang speaks of the idea of the "tyranny of authenticity" as an enemy of art--it's an idea I've been thinking a lot about in the past few months. We went to the Yves Saint Laurent exhibit at the DeYoung today, which was smaller than I expected it to be but still quite overwhelming. In a video on his life, the following quotation from him about what is so important and glorious about fashion:

"A woman becomes bewitching when she cheats, when Artifice enters the picture."

Just looking at his work--and thinking about fashion that way--fashion is not supposed to be about the tyranny of being perfect--just appearing so.

let the magic die

2009-01-12T08:37:00.000-08:00

Look, Loretta Greco is great and it must suck to be hired to a theater which instantly goes bankrupt.

But perhaps, after too many years of financial and artistic mismanagement, the Magic Theatre has ceased to become a relevant entity, has ceased to respond to the needs of the Bay Area and the American theater, and maybe we should let it die. Theaters have their own life cycle, and perhaps the Magic has reached the end of its life.

Takarazuka Review / Gender Gap

2008-12-26T23:00:00.000-08:00

Just stumbled through the last of Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan, by Jennifer Robertson. The book isn't great (see below), but a lot of Robertson's ideas are interesting, and the phenomenon of Takarazuka is amazing.

Takarazuka Revue is the only theater I even considered seeing while we were in Japan, and I'm sorry we couldn't fit it into our schedule. It's just my kind of study, like watching outdoor dramas: a cult phenomenon, populist to the core, chock full of reactionary politics, in no way high art, and deeply beloved by a committed fan base. Given the choice, I would have taken it over kabuki or noh or butoh or even bunraku any day of the week.

Founded in 1916, Takarazuka Revue is an all-female musical theater troupe that performs in their home town of Takarazuka (north of Osaka) and in a satellite Tokyo theater.

The shows run the gamut from A to B (as per Dorothy Parker): original musical revues, or musicals, classic or modern texts adapted into musical revues (everything from Japanese folk tales to Edith Wharton novels to Oliver Stone's JFK (um, wtf!?)). Descriptions of the shows remind me of descriptions of turn of the century American theater: an overstuffed sandwich of sentimental and sensational, with lavish production values, high melodrama, lots of romance and heartbreak, presented more as montage than narrative.

The all-female cast that performs in Takarazuka (Takarisiennes) come from the theater's training school. After the first year of rigorous dance and musical training, actors are divided into male and female performers: otokoyaku and musumeyaku. The women are never referred to as actors by the Takarazuka administration: they are "students." This status: a) allows their bosses to feel justified in paying them lower wages and b) keeps them from seeming threatening as professional women.

Becasue the shows are threatening in many ways, and this seems to be the tension that has kept Takarazuka a live wire for over 90 years.

On the One Hand
The Revue was founded by a Ichizo Kobayashi, a Japanese train industrialist and briefly Japan's Secretary of Commerce. He wanted to bring more tourism (sell more train tickets) to the hot springs town of Takarazuka, and saw an opportunity for something Japan hadn't seen since women were banished from Kabuki: females on stage. And he also wanted to create a consumer class among women.

In doing so, he was an early progenitor of Japan's consumer culture, and reading about his vision for women as agents of commerce reminds me strongly of an idea that Ingrid floated to me a few months back, specifically talking about what's happening in Beijing: more and more, people are trading their human rights for consumer rights. Which more on later.

Kobayashi was interested in more than commerce, however: he believed that Takarazuka could train both its "students" and audiences on the proper way of being a female in Japanese society: Good Wives, Wise Mothers, the Meiji era idea of women's role in society written into public civic code.

Women who otherwise didn't fit into this role, could train for it at the Revue. Other women, in watching the Revue, could have their offstage roles illuminated for them, by females and not only onnagata (Kabuki actors who play women, and apparently embody the Female Ideal.) The administrative hierarchy of Takarazuka still reinforces this ideal gender hierarchy: all the high level administrators, and the writers and directors of the shows themselves, are men.

So training and teaching the finest expression of Japanese gender roles: this was Kobayashi's dream of Takarazuka.

On the Other Hand
Something happened which Kobayashi couldn't control, that thing that we, as modern queer-friendly readers expect to happen when you create an all-women's theater troup in a country where the word for "wife" comes from the same word as "in." Meaning "inside," as in, "inside the house." In a country where the same worldwide anti-homosexual panic of the early 20th century swept national publications and airwaves, with the same messages that homosexuality was "perverse" and the practice of "social degenerates"--but where over 90% of said hysteria was over female same-sex relations, while male-male sex was (and continues to be) shrugged off.

Takarazuka became a huge site for female-female desire--onstage and off.

The school attracted women who wanted an independent stake in life--and ended up including a lot of dykes who would get into notorious public affairs, keeping Takarazuka on their toes with suffocating PR sweeps.

The Revue very quickly very quickly developed a passionate fan base who were (and continue to be) explicitly in the audience not the stated reactionary gender messages of the shows--but for the heat and excitement of live performance and dance numbers and for highly charismatic butches and femmes in romatic situations onstage, hot sexy androgyny.

And the stars of Takarazuka (not surprisingly) became the otokoyaku, the "male" actors, fly singing-dancing butches (or more androgynous hotties) who developed their own hordes of love-letter writing, backstage-mooning, rabid female fans. Some of these fans create their own amateur Takarazuka shows. Some of them will actually act as unpaid servants to their beloved stars.

And it seems that this tension--between the stated mission of Takarazuka in promoting gender stability--and the "unstable" slippery female desires that the shows seem to unleash--which provides the appeal for these hokey old shows.

Now, the book.

It's been awhile since I've slogged through academic-speak identity politics--and boy, it is a slog. Is it just that I no longer read these books or do they no longer publish them? Has this moment of "theory" passed? I hope so.

She insists the book isn't a history of Takarazuka, Takarazuka is just a framework through which she explores gender and sexual politics in Japan. Some of her s ideas / theories of how to read Takarazuka, and how she places the emergence of theater in the context of a discourse of gender and sexuality in Japan, that's all quite fine. But her presentation of research feels pretty sloppy. The book (and her few incisive insights) would have probably better been served with more historical and performance detail.

Unfortunately, it's the only book like that out there.

reframing

2008-12-14T20:23:00.000-08:00

Currently, I'm figuring out how to describe my work in a "Studio Art" context. Any recommendations as to performance artists and performing artists and fine artists that I should be looking up as my forebears are welcome.

Briefly:

Man on Wire / The story of performer Philippe Petit's famous tightrope walk between the World Trade Center twin towers in 1974. We know at the beginning of the movie that the walk succeeded; we know that Petit lived to tell the tale. It could so easily be reduced to a VH1 special narrative. But director James Marsh expertly manipulates archival footage, interviews and re-enactment to create the tension leading up to the event, through the community of friends and hangers-on who committed with Petit to making this gorgeous, insane dream possible.

It is really so well constructed that when we finally reach that tightrope walk, which remains Petit's magnum opus, we are left as dazzled as the WTC cop (my favorite footage in the entire film) who, at the press conference, calls Petit a "dancer" because you couldn't just call what he was doing walking, exactly, and says that he decided to just really watch and appreciate what was going on, because he knew he'd never see anything like that again.

We have also been set up to appreciate the more sophisticated story Marsh created--by turns heroic, ecstatic and melancholy--about making art, the nature of friendship and collaboration, and the corruptions of success and genius. Beautiful, beautiful movie.

deep thought

2008-12-11T15:04:00.000-08:00

I imagine myself reading at a reading. And the last thing I imagine reading is something I wrote. Perhaps that has to change.

recent op-ed in the Chicago Trib

2008-12-09T16:35:00.000-08:00

"The realization—or rather, the belief—that at so many points in our lives the world wants us to be different—older and sexier, or younger and fresher—comes at a social cost. Girls and then women become so busy self-modifying or improving that little time is left over for learning or doing. We have the power to change the world, but it's too often subjugated to the culturally constructed need to change ourselves." Anna K. Ream

twilight: neutered vampires

2008-12-09T16:05:00.000-08:00

God, it's been so hard to figure out how to start this, but let's try. Ok, how about this?

Reading the Twilight series has been like slowing down to gawk at a string of car wrecks, only--like thispo/pro-ana websites, like the skeletal thinning down of the "new" 90210 and Sweet Valley High--the wreck is American girlhood.

Sometimes I think I only stay sane by avoiding 90% of American popular culture. I accept that the world is full of hackmo schmackmo bad fiction, bad young adult lit, and bad young adult lit that gets sold and made into movies, I just don’t need to know about it.

The Twilight series sets itself apart because it has developed a massive cult following of teen girls—plus their moms. Millions and millions of books sold. Harry Potter-like levels of obsessive fans.

The movie, which opened a few weeks ago, marked the first time a female director (Catherine Hardwicke) has ever been #1 on Opening Weekend at the Box Office (of course they axed her for the sequels).

And yet the books themselves are utterly undistinguished in terms of plot, character, concept and execution—notable only as a beacon-like example of the mediocre being the enemy of the good. So why are they so popular?

What makes Twilight so painful to me, so disturbing and so notable, is that the overwhelming success of these books, the lame desires it celebrates, holds a mirror up to both a yearning currently alive in young women—and the dreary, damaging time in American sexual culture that creates and feeds this yearning.

For a terrific summary of the series, Laura Miller's Salon article.

But the basics: high school junior Bella Swan moves in with her dad in the rural town of Forks. At school, she meets Edward Cullen, a gorgeous vampire who lives with a coven of "moral" vampires: they have trained themselves to sustain their needs on animals, not human blood. Despite her ordinariness, Bella's blood possesses something magical for Edward. She smells utterly amazing to him—a once in a lifetime smell!—like the finest bouquet of the finest bottle of wine!--he desires desperately to eat her. But as a resolutely moral vampire, he won't.

Bella finds herself dazzled by his beauty and morality (note: in this world, "beauty" = "pretty." "Morality"'s equation is similarly obvious.). But more than his beauty, Edward's desire for Bella makes him unutterably desirable to her, as a carnivorous plant smells like sugar to its prey.

Out of this mutual hunger, they fall in love. Eternal lasting forever-type totally cliché love.

Things can't ever get too sexy between them, because he'll either lose control and eat her, or fuck her to death (her human body can't handle vampire sex). She wants him to transform her into a vampire right away (so she won’t be eternally “older looking” than him, given that he had been “changed” at 17). Also, she wants to be a vampire so they can have vampire sex and also be forever eternally linked and in love blah blah blah.

This, essentially, drives the entire four book series.

II.

For months, director and friend Ellen Sebastian Chang has been trying to hip me to this girl phenomenon. Her mother, who lives in the part of Washington State in which the novels are set, had sent her the books. As Ellen read them for the first time, trying to understand their pulse, she sensed something odd...

"Were these written by a Christian fundamentalist?" Ellen asked her mother, to which mom replied:

"Oh no. Much worse. A Mormon."

Oh yes. And you want to know what’s even worse? A 34-year old Mormon mother of 3 who says these books are like foreplay for her.

The Puritan quality of American fundamentalism courses through the book. The “good” vampires with their heroic self-denial. The vampire body as a paeans to the Mormon obsession with whiteness--gloriously, perfectly marble-like sculpted beings who need to live in grey cloudy places because sunshine makes them glitter like beautiful dazzly diamonds.

Eternal sealing and bonding (as a marriage metaphor). Masturbation and real wet sexual desire and drinking among teenagers? Doesn’t exist. Sex is never explicitly referred to, which is rather Victorian. The series even makes excruciating, self-important references to Wuthering Heights, where Bella compares herself to Catherine (AS! IF!).

III.

This “Victorian” quality leads to the one element of the writing in which I actually take some pleasure. Author Stephanie Meyer does manage to capture the breathless, potent dizziness of initial teenage sexual experiences.

The "oh my God he's kissing my neck I'm going to die" moment. The first time you feel that the entire outside world has completely disappeared, and the points of contact--lips, hands, breath--are all that exist. The intoxicating new power when you don't just feel desire, you feel desirable. The pleasure that exists when you don't even know what to want next, even though your body is telling you it wants something.

Caitlin Flanigan writes persuasively about just this element of Twilight—she believes the books capture the complexity of adolescent female desire in that juicy, frightening moment in between girlhood and womanhood; she also, quite movingly, describes how it felt to have those particular memories stirred in her, her yearning for the “romantic charge” of her teen years that the series triggered within her.

But Flanigan writes about such things more beautifully and provocatively than the source material she’s quoting, which is why I’m afraid I have to respectfully disagree with her. Flanigan breathlessly compares elements of the book to Jane Eyre and Rebecca, describing Bella as a heroine of the old fashioned Victorian mold: she reads and is good in school and is a brave, nice person and a model of domestic housewifeliness.

Yes, the glamour and romance of first love abounds in Twilight. But the hack rollercoaster of Twilight is closer in quality to the film treatment summary writing style of The Da Vinci Code than Jane Eyre; and Bella, our narrator, has none of the complexity, pluck, insight or intelligence of a good old-fashioned Victorian or Edwardian heroine.

Bella isn't especially strong, observant, witty, brave, independent or adventurous. She's a bland American smart girl. She doesn't seem to learn, or see, or yearn for self-improvement. Her feelings aren't complex. She falls in love. Bang. Done. Eternal. Nothing more.

If anything, though the book captures some of the raw emotion of teenage girlhood, it only captures the blandest, lamest, most tedious and most ignorant of the teen girl mentality. And extols the most shallow, infantilizing view of love there is.

Bella's relationship with Edward, this “eternal love” that acts as the engine of the series, lacks anything notable, admirable, sexy, or interesting. He’s smug and superior and does what’s best for her, she gets all pissed about it but then accepts that he only wants what’s best for her. Their conflicts have all the banality of made-up teenage interpersonal drama.

Her relationship with Jacob, a best friend who turns out to be (whoopsie!) a werewolf, has far more depth and heat and humanity. But of course, at the end, even though she loves Jacob, it isn’t like the way she feels for her pretty vampire.

Which would be ok, I guess, if it was coming from a teenage writer. But it isn’t. It’s coming from a grown woman. And this is her fantasy. And it is the fantasy of not only teenage girls reading it, but their mothers, who make up a big percentage of the fan base.

IV.

If I haven't made myself clear, the books are an excruciating read, like biting on a cold sore.

There's a scene where Edward and Bella are arguing over whether it would be in her best interest to become a vampire. She goes to his house and gets his coven sitting around the dining table and says something like, "ok, like, I want to become a vampire and Edward thinks I'll be missing out on like, human life and stuff, so, we're going to have a vote, and if you all want me to be a vampire, then Edward has to make me one, k?" She turns what could potentially be a momentous decision that ripples with consequences into her very own student body president elections.

In Twilight, the most complex feelings of adolescence are rendered safe and obvious. We know it’s going to be a happy ending! All close shaves end up well. Edward and his coven pose utterly no danger. The entire series renders the vampire itself neuter.

But the vampire is a Victorian artifact—the mythic embodiment of people’s deepest fears and darkest inner demons (meaning, desires)--it has been reinvented hundreds of times over the past 150 years to reflect the monster of the moment, from a rainbow of deviant sexualities—to ferocious bloodthirsty viciousness—to rampant diseases—to bestial lack of control.

Never has the monster been rendered so utterly safe—hence pointless—as in Twilight. Yes, there are evil bloodthirsty vampires in the world of the series, but our knowledge of the vampires is as a coven of beautiful beings with somewhat questionable desires they keep under control so they can live a happy peaceful life. Like Christians. Utterly neutered, like the 1970s Castro of the movie Milk.

The danger of Twilight's vampires are never real enough—the desire never means enough. So the stakes never feel important.

The entire series never feels like anything more than a teenage girl making a big deal out of nothing. When something feels like a big deal vs. when it is a big deal vs. when it actually isn't a big deal--when something is a rule or limit vs. when it isn't really that important--switches around so easily, so conveniently, so capriciously, that it quickly becomes the little boy who cried wolf and I have a hard time believing in the stakes of any of it.

VI.

So. We are left with shallow, cliched ideas of love, a mediocre heroine and a neutered vampire, in a world which lacks true stakes.

I believe all of it is responsible for the book's huge appeal.

The appeal seems to be that there’s this girl who is nothing special. Not her looks, not her personality, not her brain. She’s ok, she’s not a zero, boys like her fine, she's really good in school, but she’s nothing special at all. And yet, she just innately has something about her that makes her utterly, utterly, desirable to this impossibly dreamy boy, who desires her more than he’s ever desired anything in his long, eternal life.

She wants him too, now, and even though she wants him badly, no matter what, he respects her too much to want to corrupt her in any way. So they don't have sex, because he's too much of a gentleman to possibly risk her in any way, even though, no worries ladies! He totally totally desires her.

As Miller's Salon article perceptively notes, Bella is more of a bland placeholder for the reader than a character. And the experience the reader gets to have, is a girl who is nothing special living a totally cliched easy non-confrontational vision of true eternal love.

It's the world's reward for what women should want, with all the dangerous parts removed.

The Twilight world is a world where you will avoid nasty sexual exploitation--by beings saved. You will still base your life and happiness around male approval and desire--but at least, without being barraged by totally unrealistic and damaging ideas of what the female body and the sexy female body should be. You get to abandon yourself to sexual desire and being adored, desired, loved and worshipped--but the man will protect you not only from him, but from yourself! And none of it requires work or practice or training.

Where is the independence? Where is the curiosity? Where is the woman as adventurer? What kind of a heroine is this, what kind of a message, what kind of satisfaction?

But also, where is sex as something exciting and beautiful and healthy, something to learn about negotiating? Or where is the real risk about sex, emotionally and physically?

All I see in the appeal of the Twilight books is exhaustion, an escape from the wretched expectations, the shallow pool that women are expected to float in these days. But it does so in a lazy way, not a heroic way.

And I guess girls just finish these books, sigh, and go back to fantasizing about it in between their tween bikini waxes and Pilates classes.

being honest in the bay: a decision

2008-12-04T09:01:00.000-08:00

So in '05, when I was still pretty new to the Yay Area, I saw a play that left me grumpy. Some nice work onstage, but I couldn't be down with why they even wasted the time for a real museum piece of a script, produced in an irrelevant, imitative fashion (when it could have used some active adaptation).

I reviewed it here on the blog. Then, I met and became quite friendly with one of the women who produced the play--it seemed like she might be connected to potential teaching gigs. Plus I really liked her as a person. So I went back to my blog and deleted the entry. Because I don't like to hurt my friends' feelings.

This has happened many times. Not that I delete an entry, but that I choose not to write it. If someone doesn't ask my opinion, I don't give it, which I believe to be meet and seemly. But my blog is for me, and for my readers who are interested in what I have to say, and I stay pretty shy of reviews when a play is mediocre, or bad, or makes me angry.

This points to a bigger problem, I think, which is the lack of honest criticality here in the Bay Area performing arts community. Perhaps its the loosey-goosey Bay Area, "oh yeah man, I totally see what you were trying to do" thing. Perhaps performing arts folks are too sensitive. Perhaps so much of the work is mediocre that it's hard to even argue about the ideas. Perhaps people don't trust each other enough to not be polite.

The latter two seem to be it, more. I feel far more comfortable engaging in a crackling debate with someone whose work and person I like, or at least, respect. But I also don't feel like challenging the work is welcome. And challenging the work is what needs to happen here.

This doesn't mean bashing the work. It means challenging. interrogating, pushing other artists (and ourselves) to really get to the core of we're trying to do as artists and get to the next level as a community.

Of course, perhaps we all need to take lessons in giving constructive feedback.

Oh, to hell with these caveats. My critique does come from a constructive place. So I'm going to start being really honest with people, because fuck it, I'm done with theater anyway.

Also: I am a big believer that a critique, or a review, is not a final word. It's part of a conversation. I write reviewers back to keep the conversation going. And people are welcome to keep the conversation going with me.

finally being honest

2008-12-03T00:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I attended a "Continuing the Conversation: Bay Area Cultural Participation" meeting.

Since May, I have gone to no fewer than three (3) of these meetings of Bay Area artists talking about making art in the Bay Area. Not informal meets at bars. No, these are formal conferences that last many hours, with slideshows in large halls, funded by the major grantors of our fair region.

They all have a few things in common:

The conferences, as I said, are funded by the big grantors. You get the sense that said grantors would rather give money to an arts conference (so they can report that they reached 300 artists! who then can reach thousands of people!) than give money to artists.
Perhaps this is why, every time, the funders congratulate themselves on bringing us together. And then have the audacity to tell us that the tools we will learn from each other are more important than money, when we all know that at the end of the day, nothing is more helpful or important or necessary than money.
You also get the sense that this conference thing is sort of a scam for some of the people involved in throwing it...
For instance, the people they hire to "talk trends." Usually, these people are crap (oy, you should have heard the Faith Popcorn-wanna-be with her theory of everything based around generational differences at TCG). (Although, to be fair, yesterday's speaker, Holly Sidford actually gave a sensible and illuminating run-down of the specific economic, generational and cultural shifts that are our given circumstances, that I think most artists would prefer to avoid or find too impossible to deal with.)
Also, the artists who are "commissioned" to "contribute art" to "the process." Today was especially rough. (1) Paul Flores, spoken word artist, doing clearly quickly written and woefully under-rehearsed spoken word poetry of the "I'm not even aspiring to be Sarah Jones" school. There was so much to dislike--from the total lack of perspective to the lack of performance ability to the slipshod nature of it to its tired, tired, tired identity . And this was a "commission"! He got paid! (2) A woman got paid, actually "commissioned" to liveblog and set it up so that folks would twitter the conference as it was happening. If that's not a scam, I don't know what is, when liveblogger and twittering conferences is, at this point, de rigeur for the Bay Area.

Other things they always have?

Free coffee, tea and soft drinks which all the starving artists fall upon as if they haven't spent $3 on a latte ever.
Some kind of facilitated session where we share with other artists.

And? What else, Maya? SAY IT!!

I always meet and run into artists and administrators for whom I have actual regard and respect.
I'm always reminded of all this shit I have to do.
I always have a list of folks who I need to email and call (man, I need to email that guy!), but rarely do.
And. Well...this is tough to admit, but I always feel better at the end of it. I feel like I'm not alone, I always sort of get my paradigm shifted or pulled out of my drudgery enough to have ideas and feel inspired and kind of ready to go.

There were many useful insights from the day. From our public discussion

"self-curating" as a lovely metaphor for Youtubing, iPod-ding / explosion of social dancing everywhere / the aggressively increasingly multiracial and multilingual California that is already here / getting people invested in what they're about to see allows them to have a more engaged experience / how do we do that in advance more? / the idea of neighborhood based organizations that still need to be conversing in a regional context / increased access can sometimes lead to less willingness to take chances / collaborating with artists means sharing their audiences / why don't we do "board exchanges"? why don't we do artist company exchanges where I agree to go see your shit for a year if you come see mine and then we'll talk really frankly about it? (back more to this in a second) / return to the art of storytelling / people would rather participate / constant audience renewal / the arts are going to have to look different because things are changing very, very quickly

And in my own head:

Bay Area artists, especially in the performing arts or of a certain age talk about "technology" like its a far away foreign planet to which they have no spaceship.
The question of HONESTY, and the profound lack of it in the Bay Area. Honesty meaning, open criticality. And here I have an even more honest confession to make: as this is a public forum, I have a difficult time being totally honest on this blog. I'm going to take this to a new entry.

milk

2008-12-02T22:59:00.000-08:00

The movie Milk was moving more for what it evoked than as a film itself. And not even for what it evoked as a film, but for what it triggered within my own set of meaningful cultural associations.

(Especially as we were watching it IN THE CASTRO THEATER. When the organ player (what is it with being at old movie houses with organ players these days?) finished and descended, they projected Milk's name against the red velvet curtains. Being in a typical Castro packed house--hissing at Anita Bryant, sobbing at the end, Prop 8 still so fresh for everyone there.)

But so.

The emergence of lesbian culture in the 50s, 60s and 70s captured my imagination and work at a critical point during my college years. The opening documentary footage--of men from gay bars being arrested, hiding their faces from the cameras as they're shoved into paddy wagons--hit harder than most of the film for me.

And also--the 1970s in the Bay Area was one of the most fascinating times and places in 20th century history. The flowering of all of the post-60s civil rights movements--feminism, gay rights, disability rights--Milk and Moscone--Jonestown and Patty Hearst. My parents immigrated to Berkeley in '73 for grad school, I was born in Oakland in '77: all my family's myths surrounding my birth and my parents' early marriage and life together happen in that land, in that moment.

I avidly read and re-read Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series, originally serialized at the
time in the almost dead San Francisco Examiner. These stories, and both "Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple" and the (much more satisfying and illuminating) "Times of Harvey Milk" capture the era with all its turmoil and possibility, anxieties and opportunities. The tragedies which seem to capture the moment.

So while the cast (including, of course, Sean Penn) was terrific and watchable, it lacked depth, it lacked the jagged edges of the time. At the end, when I was weeping, it was because I was thinking about all the things the movie didn't evoke:

Like, thinking that it would have killed Harvey to have seen AIDS decimate the community he poured himself into.
Like, the very real, deep wells of both pain and joy that created the Castro's gay cultural explosion,
meaning: how, at its best, the Castro of the 70s is painted as a very hard-core sexual wonderland with real streaks of trauma and damage and ecstasy and freedom and creativity and bullshit and pleasure running through. The movie glanced at it, but it didn't really land for me, swept up as it was in the heroic biopic martyr narrative.
though: I thought it was best captured in the uneasy tension of Milk's first conversation with Cleve Jones on the street: a sloppy hippy in his 40s offering a teenage in tight jeans potential sexual/political mentorship. The few skittered fragments of a shitty childhood in Phoenix dispersed among the young hustler's frivolous bitchery. But other than that I just didn't feel it.
Like: the reality of cultural oppression. Twin Peaks Tavern, the bar on the corner of 17th and Castro, is important because it was the first gay bar that had big picture windows, so people on the outside could see who was drinking inside. At one point, that was a big deal.

The movie wasn't rich with that. And perhaps the form is to blame--perhaps the great biopic is impossible. Who's going to renew that form?

so beyonce ripped bob fosse

2008-12-02T08:38:00.001-08:00

Everybody rips Fosse. So what if this (or if you'd prefer, the version set to "Walk It Out" which rescued it from obscurity via YouTube)

became that?

"Single Ladies" is awesome and Beyonce is a national treasure and she can do whatever she wants (except, perhaps, run a clothing line) and we are all the better for it. She gives Gwen Verdon more than a run for her money.

tcg new generations

2008-11-30T21:33:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago, at the suggestion of Jessica Robinson, I went to the "New Generations" conference co-sponsored by Theater Bay Area and TCG.

It was surprisingly a very enjoyable experience, and a very useful one--validating and illuminating.

1) So you know how I've been talking about how the funding streams of American regional theater leads to mediocre theater? Now the regional theaters are starting to acknowledge that fact. Of course, it will take their boards another 10 years before they acknowledge it, but still.

2) I would say that most folks present were "ahead" of me, w/r/t a "career." And you know what? They're all broke and discontented. When Emilya Cachapero of TCG asked the room, "who here thinks about leaving the profession?" 80% of the room stood up.

3) I never knew that part of winning a Creative Capital grant was becoming all empowered and a motivational speaker and shit. Daniel Alexander Jones, who won a CC grant in the first year, gave basically the artist's version of a self-help talk, with worksheets, with facilitated dialogue around tables. and you know what? It was totally empowering and invigorating.

So what did I learn?

A) As D.A. Jones told us, "No one cares more about your work than you. And no one's coming."

B) At least I really love my work.

C) There are some fabulous folks out there who I've got to keep in touch with.

D) I'm going to keep making art, but I think I'm going to stop thinking about theater. I kind of even, well, think I'm done with theater.

four thoughts on sensation

2008-11-29T21:49:00.000-08:00

In prepping for Vera Wilde and in general over the past few years, , I've been thinking a lot about melodrama.

Linda Williams, in Playing the Race Card:Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson, has an excellent breakdown of melodrama as the fundamental mode by which Americans deal with morality; and also breaks down melodrama itself between its poles of storytelling technique: the sentimental and the sensational. She argues, quite wonderfully, that action movies are the peak of modern day melodrama in how it provides moral legibility through sensation.

Then there's the fine description (from John Russell Taylor's Rise and Fall of the Well Made Play) of how "there is not one moment in the whole evening when the audience is not in a state of eager expectation, waiting for something to happen, for some secret to be uncovered, some identity revealed, some inevitable confrontation actually to occur," the idea that theater should be a progression of bigger and bigger thrills, of sensation.

Sensation. It's different from melodrama, though melodrama traffics in it. Many things traffic in sensation, of course, but some recent encounters with sensation, all in some way related to narrative if not melodrama.

1.
Quantum of Solace

The only movies I see in the movie houses these days are the big smash-em-up-blow-em-up pictures. Movies that I would never consider (or admit to) spending money on 10 years ago. I can't remember the last time I put down my $10 for a fi-lum (oops, no, yes I can. It was the Coen Brothers latest minor work, Burn After Reading, as slicing and precise a condemnation of the Bush administration as any news story or documentary or drama of the past 8 years. And before that, Nanking, and before that, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and before that, I'm Not There.).

That being said it's easier to convince me to drop cash at the AMC (esp for IMAX!) than the art-house.

I guess this is the point I should confess some shame over this, but I believe that it is because when you see the big movie in the big theater, you are able to transcend the shitty quality for the experience of loud, noisy, crashy, explosive, sexy sensation. Whereas I don't have a sense of how much the impact of sensation will be diminished viewing art film on our nice high def TV. Shame on me.

So this Friday night, we took ourselves to the gorgeous Grand Lake Cinema in Lake Merritt. I had never seen a movie in the main theater there, and it's delightfully old school with a live organist playing pre-show, and the double curtain pattered with sparkly rhinestones, just a stunning place to see a movie.

We saw Quantum of Solace, which, Daniel Craig's brute hunkiness and Judi Densch's always fabulous presence aside, sucked. It sucked for the same reason that these movies, which I somehow still spend money on, have increasingly sucked over the past few years:

"Dump truck" editing. Has! Taken! Over!

Noise and breaking glass and thudding flesh and fire hits us in the face, but we can't see anything--follow any visual or aurul logic, we can't engage with the logic or suspense of well choreographed fight scene, chase scene, blow-em-up scene--so we don't get invested.

Reminds me of the dance numbers in Baz Lurhman's Moulin Rouge. Why go through all that trouble, hiring brilliant dancers and choreographers if you can't control the camera enough to let us see the bodies?

They cut away before we can get anything--before we can notice that the evil French guy even has an axe he's wielding and threatening Bond quite convincingly with, he's already comically stabbed himself in the toe with it.

Such movies and sequences create only sensation, with no impact. A moment of all climax, no rising and falling action. But without the foreplay, a lesser orgasm, no?

Often this doesn't bother me, but Friday it did, and it could be that I'll be returning to spending my money at the art house.

2.
4 Months, 3 Weeks and Two Days

2007 film fest darling, a Romanian film set during the end of the Ceaucescu totalitarian reign, as a university student shepherds her roommate through the process of procuring an abortion.

Very simple, clean and clear camera work: didn't move much, framed the picture and let the actors do the work, let us see the world. Verite with discipline. The opening sequence of the movie, which shows Otilia in the dorms, utterly relaxed, buying cigarettes for bribes, doing favors, asking favors, could have been a short film in itself.

The opposite of Bond and Hollywood.

But my viewing of this film was compromised by the trailer, which splices together the most suspenseful 3 minutes of the movie to make it appear like it's going to be a killer thriller.

So I spent the entire movie tense, waiting, unable to appreciate the true suspense it created: street-smart Otilia (played by the luminous Anamaria Marinca) negotiating a late-date crumbling bloc country that is suffocating, corrupt, passive aggressive, incompetent, secretive, watchful and cruel. Her friend, Gabita, the one getting the abortion, doubles the environment by embodying it.

A beautiful, precise fable. My expectation of sensation spoiled its own attempt towards sensation.

3.
Haruki Murakami's Underground (2000)

We wandered Japan for 2, weeks eating well and taking in sumo and walking through rural villages and being overwhelmed by the raw consumerism of Tokyo. But without a guide, it's difficult to contextualize the clues we were gathering as evidence of some sense of the national character or culture. Being in Japan is like being in those countries that separated earlier from Pangea and just evolved differently. The wings of the bird are in different places, so to speak.

Underground takes the most sensational event of the past 15 years in Japan (the sarin gas attacks by doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo) and, through interviews with survivors and former cult members, attempts to present the attacks as a reflection of Japanese society--in an entirely unsensational way.

Its very lack of sensationalism allows the disturbing quiet and regularity and conformity of Japanese culture, the society's inability to prepare for the out of the ordinary: over and over, people who were poisoned couldn't accept the reality of an attack and just went to work, stayed on subway trains where they could get a seat for once on the way to their jobs, left their jobs because their bosses couldn't deal with their PTSD, felt shame for even sharing the details of their experience.

The sensational made unsensational, the banality of evil.

4.
Hoax photo of breast disease

The most disturbing of all these. Such simple Photoshop manipulation, combining a breast with a lotus seedpod. A quiet, doctored image, more horrifying in its stillness than anything. I didn't even know what it meant to be representing (a fake South American larvae infestation in a woman's breast that comes from an unwashed new bra), and it still shocks me, unnerves me.

Sensation as hoax. Well done.

(Warning--below, it's pretty nasty).

a-merican a-t last

2008-11-05T17:38:00.000-08:00

I love this. I remember when I lived in NYC during the waning years of Clinton. I felt like my East Village/Lower East Side compatriots weren't American or anti-American, they were "A-merican," like being "amoral" or "asexual." It just didn't matter to them, they were above it all, or simply apart from it.

When I went on my road trip documenting populist theater in red states, and then on to Cornerstone and Mississippi, I got plenty of sneers about doing "social work" from folks who are now doing community-based art, or art about parts of American they don't know, or art about being American.

It took Bush's theft of 2000--and then the tragedy of 9/11--to shock folks out of their Clinton-era entitlement and apathy. And then, after 8 years of the terror and shame and humiliation his reign brought to our country (see Krugman's latest), after 8 years of seeing this land--whose membership they didn't even appreciate!--so very degraded, it took an inspiring leader who has the fastest learning curve in the history of American politics, who brought a brilliantly disciplined community-organizer strategy to his campaign--so this could happen.

dfw

2008-09-14T02:25:00.000-07:00

I am in a long and grueling tech right now for my show. After a 12 hour non-stop Saturday, I had messages from my husband and best friend Nicky that David Foster Wallace had killed himself.

I devoured Infinite Jest the summer before my senior year in college, and immediately read it again, cover to cover. I was putting up a thesis play and writing a second thesis--I didn't sleep or eat much that fall, but I would come home from rehearsal, chain smoke, and re-read Infinite Jest. Over the past 11 years, I've re-read sections of IJ, as I have his non-fiction, dozens and dozens of times. His writerly voice--that fine balance he hewed between sharp criticality and sincere empathy, between his neurotic self-centeredness and his slicing outward-facing observing eye--became an old friend. I am not a complete stranger to suicidal ideation, so when that despair claims a friend, it's particularly painful.

DFW's way of being "postmodern" was a profound touchstone for me as an artist. Postmodernism to me means acknowledging the subjectivity of narrative, and then interpretively groping through the flood of subjective narratives defining our current moment (psychological, cultural, global, political, historical, technological, unacknowledged and obvious, aspirational and advertorial).

I came of age surrounded by philosophical and creative techniques for managing the flood that always felt alien and stifling and somehow personally humiliating: using awkwardness to prove you're authentic, using preciousness to prove you're smart, using identity politics to create new exclusivity, using irony as a defensive mechanism to protect you from the gnarl of emotional honesty. Humanism and "creating meaning" were treated as outdated and old-fashioned and somehow unimportant. It made me, in my early 20s, always think of myself as a "reconstructionist" in response to the coldness and cynicism of deconstructionism.

Wallace was a big part of my reconstructionist impulse. He put the fragmenting explosion of post-modern complexity into the service of exploring an honest, moral humanity. His essay, "A Supposedly Fun thing I'll Never Do Again" is a perfect example--the overwhelming and hilarious barrage of details marshalled to limn the edges of a specific yearning and despair that defines life in this capitalist society.

I remember when I began Infinite Jest, I wasn't impressed. Or rather I was, but he was so obviously pyrotechnically clever, and I was kinda like, "oh, so what this guy is clever, big fucking deal." In people who've read Infinite Jest, I've found it true that the turning point happens somewhere between pages 250 and 300. That's where you either give up, bored, or come across a scene or moment that hits a chord you didn't know you had and you're handcuffed to the book until the end.

For me, it's the scene where James Incandenza's father talks about the holiness of inanimate objects, and the way that Marlon Brando performed a major disservice to the world by treating objects with such seeming contempt and dismissiveness. When actually, Brando was such a poet of casual, seemingly flippant behavior that that the incredible care he took had become invisible. And that the consequences of such craft and skill were monstrous. Oh, worlds opened up inside me the moment I read that section, at a cafe table in North Beach.

the genius defense

2008-07-07T15:07:00.000-07:00

just watched Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. Certainly, there was a miscarriage of justice and Polanski should have gotten away with certain things simply based on procedural issues. But of course the question is--how is it that, even over time, the rape of a 13-year old child becomes acceptable, melts away into the regard for his genius? Or even at the time? The 15-year old Natassja Kinski, the 13-year old Paula Lavigne (who Caetano Veloso left his wife for). (Oh no! the ex-diplomat says. In South America and the Congo, fucking teens is fine! Especially when I'm exploiting them for visas!)

Then again, of course, the fact that most fashion models are under 18 years old, that we place our standard of beauty and desire on the backs of children.

This is nothing new. I'm almost embarrassed to be blogging about it, about something so obvious. But that big darker thing (that makes these stories so sexy, so shocking, so deserving of front page CNN coverage, that makes the Oakland Trib run a weeklong series on child prostitution, and makes me want to see this).

That's the thing. That's the deeper thing. The acceptance and naturalness of the exploitation, and what it means to witness it as the audience.

The genius defense didn't work for Hans Reiser, although he lost his manslaughter plea (with a three years sentence that would have been finished in 2009) in the attempt, an atrocious 6-month long trial in which he performed his guilt while clumsily attempting to perform his innocence.

Now he's performing something else. His lawyer, William Du Bois, said:

"His motivation for (taking authorities to the grave) was to put some resolution to the whole thing and improve his posture with the case and bring closure to the family...He realized that to ever be paroled, he would have to acknowledge responsibility and show remorse."

See an awkward sociopath try to show remorse. (Also, watch the clip of him eating a cookie).

Of course, I don't believe him. Neither does he.

CLEAN, the piece I did in March about the gap between the fantasy of the tech industry and the toxic physical reality used Hans and Fernando Jimenez Gonzalez, a 19-year old worker at a PC board manufacturer who drowned in a vat of sulfiric acid, as the two archetypes, the mythic figures that upheld the opposite ends of "manufacturing" and the relationship with the body.

Hans was still on trial as we created and performed CLEAN. It would have been so easy to focus on the tawdry details of the case, but what was more interesting for the purposes of the piece was Hans' inability to function in the embodied world.

That's the genius defense, of course.

I was amazed at how the geeks over at SlashDot defended him to the last breath all the way up until the moment he revealed the body and confessed to the crime for a potentially lighter sentence. They trashed Nina, her infidelities, her Russianness, they blamed America for hating on programmers, even as the evidence mounted up and up.

back in pg

2008-06-23T10:22:00.000-07:00

This weekend, I went back to Port Gibson, Mississippi for the first time since 2004. My boss, Patty Crosby, was retiring from Mississippi Cultural Crossroads, an organization she founded 30 years ago.

Going back to Port Gibson, honoring Patty and celebrating her and the unbelievable body of work which she and her husband Dave have created over the past 30 years has been very humbling for me, motivating and emotional and troubling.

Patty first called me in December, 2001. Her board wanted to do a Murder Mystery Dinner Theater play as a fundraiser, and she needed a guest artist to come direct. I had just finished working for Cornerstone Theater Company (which Patty had brought in back in 1992 for a famed interracial Romeo and Juliet production that first garnered national attention for C'stone). Bill Rauch recommended me. I talked Patty into hiring me, telling her I could write a locally based murder mystery play, direct it with a cast of local people, and teach an after-school workshop all by myself, despite the fact that I had never done any of these things.

Three weeks later, I packed up my rusted to shit '85 Prelude which had taken me all over the country, and drove to Port Gibson. I passed through Vicksburg, a dying port town in which I had spent a memorable night in six months before, sleeping at the Motel Dixiana, turned South on 61, and drove 30 more miles to the town "too beautiful to burn", as U.S. Grant apocryphally called it during his march to the sea.

Now, for a girl who had most recently lived in Los Angeles and New York, this was a change, to put it mildly: the town has 1500 people, and is the county seat of a 7,000 person county. The racial divide is still firmly entrenched: 80% black, much of it in poverty; the remaining 20%, white folks who still, for the most part, control the money. One of the most famous civil rights cases that the NAACP Legal Defense Fund ever won was Claiborne Hardware et al vs. NAACP, in which local white businesses sued the NAACP and black residents for boycotting them. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court and was finally decided (against the white businesses, of course) in 1982.

I came to direct one play, I came for three months. I stayed and directed four plays over the course of 15 months between January 2002 and September 2003. In doing so, I pretty much dropped out of the community of theater-makers that I had built up in New York and elsewhere. I pretty much fell off the map.

It was quite a lonely time. My cell phone didn't get reception and I was mostly alone and sometimes it felt that anyone my age who still lived in the town was either an alcoholic or had been in jail or had multiple kids. I would drive the hour to Jackson every week and back, despite the fact that Jackson isn't the most hopping of Southern cities (leave that to Birmingham and Atlanta and Nashville and pre-Katrina New Orleans), to talk on my cell phone and buy a block of tofu and sit in a cafe and have a proper cup of coffee or a proper non-Budweiser bottle of beer.

Of course, it was also an exhilarating time, which is why I stayed and let myself fall off the map for two years. There was something very clean about the quiet of a small rural town--I read and wrote and learned my civil rights history properly for the first time in my life.

I experienced previously unimaginable American realities (for me, at least) every day--from the catfish farms to the strip club where the deer hunters hung out to the Pink Palace juke joint in Hermansville to the drag show in the black gay club in Jackson. I was taught how to shoot a gun by rednecks in the backwoods, and drank beer at the white honky tonk out in the shadow of the nuclear power plant.

I spoke at the all-white Lion's Club lunch and had the first female black welder in the county show me her self-published romance novels. I went to a bazillion different church services, trawling for local participants. I karaoked with the white working class in Vicksburg on a Friday night, smoked blunts and sipped sizzurp in Clancy's white Mercedes SUV which had "GODIVA" stenciled on the front window.

I spent the day on the banks of the Bayou Pierre with middle aged good ol' boys, now sober and marked by their wild youth, as they told me alternating stories of soberness and bitterness and thankfulness. I saw my first fireflies and thunderstorms and hurricanes. I drove to nearly every city and teeny town in Mississippi with a performing troupe of 14-year old rural black kids who'd never been onstage, allowed them to "baptize" me in a Starkville motel pool, and had them do theater games on Faulkner's lawn in Oxford.

All of which was pretty damn cool.

But it was much more than the glamour of the unknown and exotic. I also was engaged in one of the most intensive periods of learning in my life. My whole life changed. And that's because of Patty Crosby.

Patty and Dave are collaboratively responsible for the outstanding programming and organizational strength of Mississippi Cultural Crossroads--their tentacles extend to so many different kinds of Good Works: art in the schools for all ages; afterschool arts; Summer Arts job programs for teenagers; their beloved Peanut Butter & Jelly, a pro-literacy traveling summer children's theater; community health programs; community reading programs; the documentation of and support of local craft arts, especially quilting, for which previously unrecognized local quilters were given NEA grants; local historical research of larger national import, from extensive and exquisitely documented oral history collection to exhibits on the local civil rights movement, the Rabbit's Foot Minstrel Show which was stationed in Port Gibson, and the stunning rediscovery and exhibition of early 20th century photographs taken by Leigh Briscoe Allen, a planter's son. And of course, live theater.

All of their programming would overlap--the theater would connect to literacy; the arts programs would connect to teaching kids professional skills; oral history collection would be done by teenagers. It's shockingly impressive to witness the depth and breadth of their work in retrospect--this is the hot shit in current arts and culture funding, and they've been doing it, brilliantly, for 30 years!

So Patty and Dave are the pillars of the Great Work. But Patty was my boss. She and I worked together for all of these months, and the way she understood and explained things had a profound impact on me. I knew I had to work with her until I could absorb some of her worldview. She knows how to read the world with simultaneous causation: she sees how the forces of history and current socioeconomic structures and psychology and personality all intersect to explain a moment. And she always can explain it with a story.

For example--I was irritated with a teacher at the local public high school. Patty broke it down--in terms of this teacher's personal life and personality, but also in terms of the culture of the local school system, and then also in terms of how that culture of the local school system developed historically and in relation to the civil rights movement.

I tell you what--her insight and Dave's insight humbled me, and kept me from ever presuming to write one of those, "white intellectual/Ivy leaguer comes to the South, is shocked" narratives that New York publishers love to gobble up. Like this. Or this. Or even, as much as I love it, this.

It was so powerful, my time in Mississippi. It was so important to me. Because I felt the purpose of the work we were doing was so strong, that I didn't even mind truly surrendering my own will as an artist to represent the community. Enough so, that I stayed longer than was probably good for me, given the dearth of a personal community and lack of an outlet to express my own self creatively (or oftentimes, socially).

So.

Being back there. Being back there. What did it mean to be back there?

I was most powerfully reminded of that sense of purpose. And of Patty's importance to me as a mentor. And it leaves me, today, wondering how to translate what was so momentous about that time back to my own life. Not necessarily in the type of work I do--as a teacher and facilitator/director of community-based work, I've clearly taken my time in Port Gibson forward with me.

But the spirit of it. That sense of possibility and purpose and importance that suffused my every day there. That hopefulness, and the pride in what I was doing. Also, Patty's stubbornness vision. Her eagle-eyed way of really knowing and understanding a place. How do I translate that to the messier and larger arena of Oakland?

This plugs into a larger question I've been asking myself--about arrogance. Where is my arrogance, the necessary arrogance of an artist that makes the rest of the life worthwhile? Did I ever have it? Will I never have it? Did the obvious needs of Mississippi let me avoid answering that question of myself?

And now? Where is the fire, now? How do I do as Patty does--to let all the petty bullshit around me not touch that inner fire?

back from the 'moon

2008-02-27T17:49:00.000-08:00

Spent two weeks in Patagonia with Ben, a place I've wanted to go since reading Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia 7 years ago (with thanks to Mr. Hancock and Ms. Hanway).

It was the brief tourist version, of course--but in some very powerful ways, fulfilled the dream. Why is it so exciting to just be somewhere, to just go somewhere and know you're there? Just being in Tierra del Fuego, at Estancia Harberton, looking out onto the water and feeling like I was at el fin del mundo filled me with joy and wonder.

Also, and I think connected, a deliriously happy return to the novel. I used to devour novels. I was raised by novels, from early childhood through my teenage years into my early twenties.

But somehow, over the past few years I have found myself far more drawn to non-fiction: memoirs, journalism, essays, research. Even when I read fiction, I mostly would stick to graphic novels, books I had read before, and trash. I was literally repelled from fiction in the bookstore. Something felt suspect about novels to me--something unclean and irritating about a novelist's motivations.

A notable exception in 2007 was Blood Meridian, which I had previously started and stopped about 3 times. I finally decided I was going to finish that fucking thing if it killed me. I've never encountered fiction that felt so hard--that's generally reserved for theory or something. But man, that book was--not work, exactly. More like a pilgrimage walking 50 miles on my knees to a shrine dedicated to the foulest elements of Western humanity.

But for CLEAN, on Ellen's advice, I picked up Stegner's Angle of Repose, and fell in love again with the majestic emotional power of the novel. The crotchety narrator's voice made me trust his need to tell story. It just woke me up, or, mixing my metaphors, felt like falling into a cool body of water after walking through the desert. And after that, Gilead by Maryanne Robinson, a humble, skillful, quiet read which was pleasant enough, then over the course, hooked me completely even as it stayed quiet, then, at the end, just shook me to pieces, I was actually sobbing in pleasurable agony on the plane.

During the trip (thank you, Dave Malloy), I started to devour War and Peace, and am about 3/4 of the way through. Oh Jesus, that's a novel. That's the novel. It's re-awakening some long-dormant spring in my imagination. His scope is so vast, but his ability to organize it all into a cohesive structure makes everything seem possible.

Irrational exuberance? Almost got me and Ben killed in the French Valley.

very nice!

2007-12-28T14:41:00.000-08:00

Sam Hurwitt of the East Bay Express saw fit to name CLOWN BIBLE the best show in the East Bay, 2007. Ok, well, maybe it wasn't really in any order, but it was a top ten list, and we were #1. Above Les Waters' Pillowman at Berkeley Rep.

Go see!

He also said Dave's songs made for the Best Onstage Music of the Year, "because it was impossible to come away from Clown Bible not singing, "I'm Saaamson, I'm craaaazy."

Thanks, Sam!

democracy in america!

2007-11-20T10:03:00.000-08:00

The fantastic Annie Dorsen (she most recently directed and guided the development of Stew's outstanding Passing Strange, which was at both Berkeley Rep and the Public) is finally doing a project she's had in the works for years--adapting to stage (conceptually, of course) de Toqueville's Democracy in America.

It begins with this, at Joe's Pub in NYC, this coming Monday, November 26.

[Annie] auctions off Democracy in America, the first performance piece in which the consumers are the creators. Make a bid for your wildest ideas to be included in this pop-political extravaganza -- buy a dance, a song, or the very first word of the show -- then see it onstage at the show's premiere in April, 2008. This is your chance to get in on the ground floor of the largest collaboration in theatre history.

Apparently, the website (www.buydemocracy.com) will let you buy online as well. I will certainly be ready to buy.

flying refrigerators

2007-11-20T09:59:00.001-08:00

in the dream, I'm wearing sexy but conservative grown-up clothes--button up shirt, well-cut skirt, pumps, in dark and neutral colors--with the exception of the tights, which are crazily vertically striped in dark blue and white. As I walk up the stairs to the little upper cafe floor overlooking the rest of the cafe, a man eating (blond, not at all pretty, kind of big and Britishy) stops and stares at me. He introduces himself, asks me what I do. I proudly tell him I'm a theater director. He proudly tells me he's an MP in the Labour Party, which surprises me because he totally looks like a Tory.

I sit down with my mother at the cafe table, and the play starts. It's magnificent, I'm roiling in envy at its beauty. I remember nothing about it except that at some point, a refrigerator which is suspended from the ceiling, explodes by the force of another refrigerator swinging into it.

wedding masques

2007-11-20T09:07:00.000-08:00

Ben and I got married on November 11. It was a truly joyous occasion, full of love and friendship and family. A perfect weekend--from the Chinese banquet and wild karaoke on Friday night, to bagels and coffee at the Gliderport overlooking the ocean on Saturday morning, to the delicious Israeli food and wonderful vibe of my parents' house on Saturday night, to the Sunday morning ceremony and reception.

It ain't bragging if it's true, right? But I swear, I only bring it up to mention the brief wedding masque I put together for Ben.

The masque was a form of festive entertainment in 16th and 17th century Europe, short plays and spectacles presented to and performed for royalty on the occasion of a birth, marriage, or coronation. They often included pastoral settings, mythological fables and an allegory. One of my favorite wedding ones involved a giant castle being wheeled in, then stormed by knights. Once the knights had, ahem, breached the castle walls, beautiful young ladies emerged and they danced. Often the prince would be pulled in to participate--like, they would pull the prince up and make him gamble with loaded dice that had him win, over and over again.

I figured that since I'm not bringing much earning power to the marriage, this is something I can do. Everything about it, from the concept to the execution, was a complete surprise to Ben--he had no idea I had even been considering such a thing, and I've been talking about it with his friends for at least 6-8 months.

The masque went suchly:

Ben and I entered the reception hall and went right into our first dance ("You Can Have It All" as performed by Yo La Tengo). As we danced, very hug and sway, foam-core puppets started emerging and circling us, creating a wonderfully cheesy pastoral landscape. We (Nicky, Brian, Liz, Mike, my cousin Vered and Ben's cousin Kathy) had made flowers and butterflies, a rainbow, a tree, stars, a sun/moon. Kathy created two incredible squirrels. Vered came into the craft-party late, heard about the pastoral, thought for a second and decided: "a mother duck and three baby ducks!" which were puppeted by my mom, Vered, her brother Arie and my brother Ron.

The puppets danced and swayed with us. Ben was already in shock at this point. Then, a blood-curdling scream.

And Evil emerged. Played by my friend Mike Jaros from UCSD, Evil wore a Mexican wrestler mask and a cape, stormed in, threatened the pastoral landscape, which all cowered in the corner. Evil and I faced off, began a ferocious thumb wrestling battle, but of course I couldn't defeat Evil alone. Ben and I were then handed foam-core swords, and defeated Evil together, restoring the pastoral landscape.

Which then went into the simcha dancing, Jewish celebration dancing. I hadn't known until we were putting this all together that after the married couple gets lifted on the chairs, they remain seated in the chairs and people entertain them as if they were king and queen--perfect for a masque. Actually, the tradition probably emerged as a response to the oppression of Jews in Europe--a burlesque of power, a way to celebrate the marriage.

So anyway, we broke into Hava Nagila, Ben and we got lifted up on chairs, and set down, and people performed for us. There was crazy hula hooping, from my mother and others (Shir hula hooped and danced--Sari put the hoop around her neck). Juggling. Acrobatics from my Clown Biblers. Jane had brought her clown nose and clowned for us. A kick line spontaneously formed. Rachel and Alex played matador and bull. It was insane.

I didn't want anything about the ceremony to be a performance, but there's nothing like perforamnce to kick off the party.

hello?

2007-08-07T17:45:00.000-07:00

I haven't written since April. I think it will stop being busy, but no. Once CLOWN BIBLE closed, it was tech and opening HAIR. Once HAIR closed, it was pulling together a final performance and ending the school year in East Oakland. Obligations with day job copywriting, obligations with other theater projects that I had a hand in here and there. Once that was done, and I had a full night's sleep for first time in 6 months, it was company business: grants and applications and the CLOWN BIBLE DVD.

All of these fascinating experiences I wasn't writing about! I will, I have to write a few words about HAIR, which was an amazing thing.

So.

I recently had an experience with the theater apparatus. And I want to write about it. This blog is about making theater in America. It is also about the state of the American theater--the state of the art, the state of the profession, the state of its narrow economy, the state of its audience, and the state of its academy. Even when I'm just snarkily reviewing a show, it is always in that context.

Of course, when I make art and when I write about those things, I do so as an outsider, from outside the apparatus. Because at a very young age (say, 18), I really felt like the theater in America was in a sorry state, and didn't feel like success on those terms would really be success. I still feel that way--often extremely lonely in my profession, without allies.

I had a brief, uneasy do si do with the Powers That Be, the Big Professional Apparatus. And I want to write about it. But I'm not sure quite how yet.

More soon.

finally, jeez

2007-04-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

I am happy to report that, on Week Three of our run, CLOWN BIBLE finally came together. Week One, we were just trying to avoid total disaster. Week Two, we were tightening farty awkward transitions, and in straining to really clean the damn thing up kind of lost the play of clown. I don't think a single show went by without major changes.

Last weekend, we seemed to find the balance. Adding a brief intermission took the pressure off making everything fast; and returning to group warm-up, including clown turns, makes the biggest difference.

I haven't written much about the process of making CLOWN BIBLE. It's been a tough slog--a very pleasurable and rewarding one, don't get me wrong (at some point, I just have to put up on the blog some of our process of clown training and creation, not to mention some of the stories that we cut)--but taking the stories of the Bible and translating them in this way, and having it be a cohesive piece and not some shitty "The Bible, Abridged," and plus it's pretty much a full musical, but it's a clown show too, and finding the balance of it, oh dear.

Anyway, more soon later, but that's where it's at. I can confidently say it's a beautiful show, and you should come out and not miss it.

Up and Running! Reviews!

2007-03-30T10:15:00.000-07:00

So we opened CLOWN BIBLE last weekend. I didn't realize how much I missed my cast until our brush-up rehearsal last night. Opening weekend was a trip--and we got great reviews:

From our review in the East Bay Express:

"hilarious, haunting, and unexpectedly challenging in the hands of Ten Red Hen. Their no-budget {The 99-cent} Miss Saigon was a hard act to follow, but CLOWN BIBLE is better. The magic of the show lies less in any great spectacle of circus arts than in the way it can turn from funny to devastating in an instant."

And from the Berkeley Daily Planet:

"The ensemble is due full, heartfelt praise, as is Ten Red Hen founder Maya Gurantz, for a truly collaborative show...contributing to the unique style and flavor of this bravura piece, a veritable tabernacle of prat-fall praise to the greater glories of the Theater of the World (amen)...CLOWN BIBLE is a theatrical event of real magnitude; the show doesn't degrade scripture, but elevates the quietly sad or manically grinning countenance of the clown, as did the medieval Miracle Plays and strangely humorous decor of cathedrals, where sacred stories seem to get sent up on sacred occasions and in sacred places."

I am sure I'll have more to say regarding the process, and what we're finding, but let this do for now:

This particular production doesn't feel "finished" in the way that other plays can. How could it? We're attempting these tricky translations, translating Bible into clown vernacular, and in the process, asking sometimes painful questions about man and faith and culture and ourselves.

It feels like the beginning of something. We need your feedback--please come and see it.

the necessity of entitlement

2007-03-12T11:42:00.000-07:00

I don't know why this is--let's blame it on the path that led to me directing: years of being a bad ballet dancer, followed by the years of being an insecure actor--but I have never been very good about demanding resources.

I'm demand a lot of my actors, I'm great at demanding a lot of myself, but demanding a stage manager? A real set? Demanding tech? Forget it. There seems to be a part of myself that is so sure that I don't deserve it, or that refuses to believe that I can insist on it. Plus, I don't have much talent or training in it, so it feels kind of out of my reach.

Which means that I usually dress the odd spaces I end up in, and have very prop-heavy shows, and do a lot of it myself, or put it on the actors. And I make the excuse, "hey, it's poor theater." I'm not so special in this regard--a lot of smaller theaters do this--but I don't know anyone who feels as unentitled to tech as I feel.

So I want to appreciate this moment. For once, I insisted that we have a real stage manager for this show--and the brilliant Sarah Elovich appeared and took over. I strong armed a friend of Alexis into running tech and then into being production manager. Mike Howard. He is doing such a great job.

My old friend Adrian W. Jones, an outstanding set designer, agreed to come out from New York on his own dime to design CLOWN BIBLE. Through him, we found a lighting designer (Ray Oppenheimer, yo yo!), and a set builder. He pushed for a costume designer, and the talented and lovely Melissa Bertolino appeared, as if sent by an angel.

I don't have to do everything. It's fantastic. And it's surprisingly not costing me that much.

Don't get me wrong. We're moving from a 99-cent show to a dollar-fifty show. It's still minimal, it's still low budget, and the success or failure of it will still depend entirely on the actors and the beauty of liveness. It requires a lot of very talented people working for way less than they deserve. We're a week-and-a-half away. I'm wracked with the usual anxiety.

But wow--what a big difference to have these things. It all comes from having a higher set of standards of what we are entitled to. My minimum standards for putting on a show is way way lower than Adrian's--and it's too low for me, frankly. Thank God he's here, with his higher minimum standard.

Excuses, Excuses.

2007-03-02T11:39:00.000-08:00

I am so ashamed that I haven't been blogging--I have been very, very busy. Don't believe me?

This year, I've been teaching an Intro Drama class at a high school, the East Oakland School of the Arts (formerly Castlemont) through my employing organization, Opera Piccola. This semester, my class will be doing Week 21 of 365 Days/365 Plays, so I have been generating a syllabus that takes my high schoolers through Suzan Lori Parks' various works and concerns. This is difficult. Shit, her plays are difficult for most grown adults who go to the theater. I'm accepting any advice on this matter. My after-school classes that I was also teaching didn't end til late January.

I acted in a production of the Tempest, with company Ragged Wing. This is the first time I was onstage in 8 years. I'll probably write more about this experience later.

The second I finished my after-school classes, I went into auditions for a (dare I say, BRECHTIAN??) deconstruction of HAIR that I'm directing with students at Berkeley High--using HAIR as a way for the students to interrogate the legacy of the 1960s.

I'm consulting on an amazing project at The Arc of San Francisco, doing a production of Grease with a community of developmentally disabled folks.

I have a company to run now. That means many, many, many grant proposals. Many. Plus more proposals for other things that I'll tell you about if I get 'em. There is actually something quite useful, organizationally, about having to write everything out--pitching the project keeps you really specific about what exactly you're trying to do, plus keeping on top of the budget and timeline and all that. Doesn't mean it ain't tedious as all hell.

Other day-jobby free-lancey type things to keep the bills paid.

And most importantly:

I've been in rehearsal and am three weeks away from opening CLOWN BIBLE with my company. I should have been blogging the process, as it has been a tremendously rich one, but generally I'm working 7am to 10pm and come home and pass out.

Now, look, I know I tend towards hyperbole, but our cast and crew are OUT OF CONTROL with their brilliance. We have a band! We have acrobatics! We have designers! I have the smartest stage manager in the world! Dave Malloy has written a score that will send chills up and down your spine! Buy your tickets, now!

I will have a lot more to say about all this, but let's let it go for now. Enjoy the new website.

CLOWN BIBLE is coming...

2007-03-01T14:31:00.000-08:00

Whole new website redesign to be unveiled in the next few days, with all the information about Ten Red Hen's next show (and the reason I haven't been blogging in the past 3 months), CLOWN BIBLE.

Working directly from Biblical text, we have translated the tales, familiar and obscure, into an experimental, live theatrical event – combining a full musical score, acrobatics and dance with the broad comic performance language of clown (think Charlie Chaplin, not Ringling Brothers). It's marvelous.

Dates:

March 22-24 (Thurs-Sat),
March 30-31 (Fri-Sat),
April 5-7 (Thurs-Sat),
April 12-14 (Thurs-Sat)
All Shows at 8pm

Willard Middle School Metalshop Theater
2425 Stuart Street, Berkeley, CA (Entrance on Regent St., Behind the School)

Sliding Scale $15-20.
Buy Tickets In Advance at: www.brownpapertickets.com, or call 1-800-838-3006
No one turned away for lack of funds.

Friday Night of 365!

2006-12-08T14:03:00.000-08:00

Info released!

Please come tonight!

2915 26th Street(@Bryant), San Francisco, CA, Earth

Close to the Cesar Chavez exit off of 101, if that matters to you.
or even if it doesn't, actually.

More info, as always, here!

CLOWN BIBLE, Auditions

2006-11-29T09:15:00.000-08:00

I've never posted an audition notice on the blog. Let's see how it goes, yes?

As some of you know, Ten Red Hen's next production is CLOWN BIBLE. A musical, highly physical, exploration of Bible stories, CLOWN BIBLE will trace the running gags of masculinity, power and corruption that run throughout the Holiest of Texts.

The show will be brought to you by the same team that put on {The 99-Cent} Miss Saigon last spring: Maya Gurantz (that's me!) will be directing, Dave Malloy writing music and musical directing, Dell'Arte grad Jane Chen will be playing God as well as leading the Clown Training.

We're looking for a few more dynamic, physically creative performers to round it out. Clown training/experience isn't necessary, but certainly welcome. Small stipend. Performances are March 22-24, 29-30, April 1, 5-7, 12-14 (4-weekend run with possible two-weekend extension). We begin rehearsals in Berkeley in mid- to late- January, and perform both in Berkeley and San Francisco.

We're holding an Audition Workshop. We'll get together, walk funny, sing, and play.

Please prepare a song you love singing, and come dressed to move. If you play an instrument or have any special clowning skills (juggle knives? balloon animals?), please bring that, too. RSVP for a space by emailing clown@tenredhen.net.

CLOWN BIBLE Audition Workshop
Monday, December 11
6:30pm-8:30pm
Willard Middle School Metalshop Theater
2425 Stuart St., Berkeley, CA

Directions: Willard Middle School is at the corner of Stuart St. and Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley. Take BART to Ashby; head east on Ashby, take a left on Telegraph and walk to Stuart. Take a right on Stuart, and your FIRST LEFT onto Regent (unmarked). Walk one block. The entrance to the Metalshop Theater is located on your left, by the Willard Park Tennis Courts.

so the below didn't make any sense

2006-11-26T11:40:00.000-08:00

I just reread it, and I admit it, it doesn't make sense.

But I do have something to write about the ensemble created/performer created theater "movement", such as it is, and about the theoretical contradictions in the lingo and technique w/r/t notions of "the psychological", the need for intellectual inquiry and context that's so often lacking, and how the tools end up most effective when anchored to the artist's strength of purpose and curiosity. Etc.

Later, later. After I write about my recent return to an obsession over becoming a commodity.

brief reviews, 2

2006-11-25T11:37:00.000-08:00

Of course I wait until plays are closed or almost closing to do this, but here goes:

Love is a Dream House in Lorin, by Marcus Gardley, dir. Aaron Davidman, Shotgun Players (CLOSED)

This play was the culmination of a 2-year long process of creating a theater piece about the Lorin District of South Berkeley--deep research, story circles, and ulitmately a play (with a combination professional and local cast) that spanned the area's history from the Ohlone Indians through the Japanese community who got carted off to internment camps in WWII, to the working class African American community who then moved in, through the unrest of the 60s, the crack epidemic of the 80s, to its current state of uneasy gentrification.

Community-based theater, as it has been in the past decade or two in America, is created on cross axes of two continuums: from very direct documentary to fictional conglomeration; from an entirely professional cast to entirely local people.

I've found that the further away you get from community people telling their own actual stories, the riskier the project--the more that the hired artist's choices run contrary to the local community's needs, the less ownership the community feels. And the attempt to summarize into fiction so often fails.

Shotgun took the risky approach, with interweaving, cross-cutting stories that each "stood in" for a particular historical arc of experience in the Lorin (using a loose verse rhyme scheme, which was alternately noticable or not, depending on the actor's skills). I'm delighted to report that the play succeeded.

I do not have the stand-in of being a Lorin native to say whether the piece served local needs. The play certainly seemed like it accomplished Shotgun's objective: a thank you, a peace offering, a gift from the theater company to their host neighborhood, and an invitation to the locals that says: this theater is yours, too.

Because, as theater, it was a riddled with Thing all the way through, an event. (Sure, it was too long--sure there were a few theatrical conventions that might have seemed--as they did to my friend, not to me--a little treacly.)

But the way they balanced the different historical narratives simultaneously (from mythic to small scale human dramas), and the way they were ultimately braided together and paid off--the painful truths of the tragedies they excavated from the land for all of us to see and how they landed it for us--was astoundingly smart and rewarding.

Bravo!

super:anti:reluctant, by mugwumpin, the Exit Theater (still running! see sidebar!)
I'm about to go onto a more philosophical tangent here, so let me say straight up, first off, and right away, super:anti:reluctant is fucking great and utterly engaging and ambitious and pleasurable and you should all see it immediately. It's promoted as a meditation on heroes, but truly, super:anti:reluctant is about our increasingly hopeless need and desire to be heroes in the face of our fears of being failures.

Now, I've often found actor/performer created work to be a bit self indulgent.

(Though, of course, the caveat to that critique is one of my favorite quotations, from an interview with Dan Bejar of Destroyer and the New Pornographers, who is often labeled as making self-indulgent work:

This whole notion of self-indulgence baffles me, as if I'm supposed to be indulging someone else.

Word up.)

What I mean, however, about performer-created work is that it can lack intellectual depth. Some high technique craft-o-philes in current theater, those who think that Viewpoints or Suzuki or Laban or clown or Lecoq is the True Answer, or somehow creates more Innovative Theater or achieves some kind of Intellectual Authenticity to make a Big Statement About Something, misses the point. A lot of performer -based work searches for the surprising theatrical moment--but attaches a lot undue meaning to what the self-conscious stirs up, to what comes out of that subconscious choice. And forgets that by being subconscious, it is totally personal.

But that, contradictorily, ends up being way more attached to the "subconscious" and the "psychological" that even Stanislavski--without triangulating to the gifts and uses of the intellect and the process of artifice that pushes you outside what you already, even subconsciously, "know." So even though it proclaims innovation and authenticity, it can actually lead to art that is as banal and boring and lacking in depth as anything worked up through the Method. This clearly, is a bigger beef I have and at some point, I'll say it more articulately.

But super:anti:reluctant worked, I thought, because it had all the physical pyrotechnics of what the mugwumpin crew know how to stir up--was visually an innovative pleasure--but it was quite nakedly personal. That forced a kind of depth on the piece, made it one of the more honest things I've seen lately:

The fear of failure, the desire to be more than a failure, the ways in which the drudgery of daily life squelches the desire for the super-heroic at the same time that we need such large desire to keep going. The many layers of masks that we wear underneath, the large cultural moments embedded in our sense of self that we can't reveal as such.

Oh, it was just great, and you really need to see it.

Passing Strange by Stew and Heidi Rosenwald, dir. Annie Dorsen, at Berkeley Rep (still playing! see sidebar!)

These brief reviews are getting too long.

Ok.

All these reviews so far have been about the risky choice that somehow, magically, worked. It's also risky to tell a coming of age story these days. Another one? Why? Haven't we heard this story?

A song with actors running through it, Passing Strange traces the semi-autobiographical account of a young black kid from L.A. and his struggles to escape the stifling bourgeois shackles of home expectations to find himself as a musician and artist in LA, Amsterdam, Berlin and back home. In this attempt to locate "the real" and himself in it, he only discovers more masks, more diverse and complicated ways to "pass"--as a punk-rocker, as James Baldwin, as an expat, as an authentic black man, as an artist, as a human.

Stew's dry, detailed, specific view of the world (and his youthful avatar) combines with a shameless musical romanticism to create an entirely pleasurable event. Great musicians, terrific set design (conceptually simple, expensive and beautiful). The actors were marvelous, the choreography neat and precise. But mostly, it succeeded as a coming-of-age piece because it didn't land on a solution. You know, how most of those stories end our characters with some choice that they make, something they lose, something gained, and somehow it's like they're, I don't know--finished? Like, that's it?

At the end of Passing Strange, this character has barely begun--and is just beginning to see how unlikely he is to achieve the real (within and without himself)--he's faced with his selfishness, his inability to love. There's nowhere to run off and escape to. Complex as life, thank you.

look at all the plays!

2006-11-20T10:59:00.000-08:00

If you notice over on the sidebar, there are a heck of a lot of plays currently going on in the Bay Area that are terrific. Which never happens. Anywhere. At any time. Is the world ending?

I'm serious, the other week I actually saw two entirely wonderful plays two nights in a row. This has never happened to me. And then I saw another great one this week--and my colleagues with similarly brutal standards who generally leave plays similarly frothing and pissed left All Wear Bowlers and Tartuffe giddy with delight. I have tickets to both and am, dare I say it? dare I dream? excited.

Capsule reviews coming, update on company business and upcoming projects soon, I tell you, soon. For now, make reservations for Ten Red Hen's 365 Plays (Week 4).

Sound of a Voice / Hotel of Dreams

2006-11-20T10:37:00.000-08:00

Jerry Langford weighs in again:

Saw one of the most haunting evenings of theatre ever last night--Woodruff's production of the Philip Glass/David Henry Hwang chamber operas The Sound of a Voice and Hotel of Dreams.

Two short pieces where Glass compresses his oceanic style into six, mostly Asian-derived instruments and two voices. In the first, a samurai stops and stays in a rural hut where a widow tends to him. In nine long scenes, the arctic crust surrounding their hearts slowly thaws, with heartbreaking, rather than heart-warming, results. In the second, an aging writer finds an urban Japanese brothel where old men are permitted to sneak into bedrooms and lie chastely next to sleeping young girls who are the same age as their widows when the old men first met them.

Who would think that these profound conceits, so insightful about the nature of men and women's interaction, particularly the self-destructiveness of men, and into both men and women's relationship to mortality, could have come from the author of Disney's Tarzan and Flower Drum Song 2.0? And not just that--he wrote these pieces at age 21! Or that Glass could be capable of such simplicity and delicacy?

I always hate hearing people talk of those things "that only theatre can do," but Voice/Hotel showed those things only opera can do. The almost unbearable climaxes of both pieces could never be attained in spoken theatre. And the fine brushwork by Woodruff and by the scenic designer Bob Israel are nonpareil.

It's exciting to have seen two truly great pieces in the theatre this year--Foreman's What to Wear at the REDCAT and Robert's double bill. Maybe not so exciting that I *don't* see great theatre that *isn't* by the same handful of great artists I loved one-half of my lifetime ago. But we have to be grateful for small favors. (To be fair, one other great show this year: Stefan's Novinski's O'Neill-like rendering of William Saroyan's Time of Your Life.)

I recommend sticking with music theatre. That seems to be the one spot where the good stuff happens.

365 Plays / 365 Days

2006-11-07T07:35:00.000-08:00

I have reviews of the three Bay Area plays on the sidebar and a longer update coming soon--but first:

365 Plays / 365 Days
In 2002, Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks committed to writing a play a day for the next 365 days. The world premiere of these plays will be performed as a year-long festival in major cities and communities across the country, spearheaded by Suzan-Lori Parks and Super-Producer Bonnie Metzgar, with David Myers as National Coordinator, Carol Fineman as Press Rep and Rebecca Rugg as 365University Producer (see Bonnie's comment below). Hubs include the Public Theater in New York. From November 2006 to November 2007, over 700 theaters will simultaneously create the largest theater collaboration in U.S. History.

In the Bay Area, 52 unique companies (from big guns like Berkeley Rep to smaller groups like the Shotgun Players) will each stage one week of the cycle.

I am very excited to announce that Ten Red Hen is presenting Week 4 of 365 Plays/365 Days (December 4-10, 2007). We are using this project as a week-long meditation on the idea that Theater is Every Day, performing the plays in the intimate space of people's homes.

While theater sometimes seems like a form of decreasing relevance in American life, it is also the most elemental--people need to enact stories live for each other. More than any other art form, theater frames the world of beauty in action.

That being said, theater is one art form that has the hardest time breaching the home space--I mean, it doesn't really belong there, right? Yes it does! For one week, we will go to a different home every night and perform the plays, engaging with the home, existing technologies within that home, and our audience members in different ways.

The events are free and open to the public, of course. We will have more information on where the homes are and how you can come see them soon.

vewy scawy

2006-10-31T11:28:00.000-08:00

So I dragged Ben and Hao to the Pirates of Emerson, an annual haunted house in the wilds of Fremont. It was a last minute decision, goaded by the good folks at Haunted Bay and my sudden need to be a kid for a moment.

It was ok--clearly a ton of work and money had been poured into it and there was lots of animatronic spectacle. As I walked through it, though, I realized that a haunted house requires two different types of scary:
1. People jumping out saying "boo!" and making you yelp; and
2. The witnessing of horrifying, terrifying things.

Our theater department in high school held an annual Haunted House as a fundraiser--I seem to recall on year, there was a scene in which we walk into a couple's intimate bedroom and watch one of the pair get sweet-talked, then horribly axed (strangled?) by the other. I mean, Hell House might be a bizarre Christian fundamentalist artifact, but at least they show souls suffering in hell, people committing suicide, others dying on the abortion table. Now that's some scary shit. That's theater right there.

Pirates was long on the "boos!", short on the actual creepy darkness reaching into your soul performance.

It certainly was no Face Your Fears Haunted House, directed by Timothy Haskell, in which they polled New Yorkers about what they feared the most, and then created five distinct, borough specific houses. (Apparently, Manhattenites fear clowns, Bronxites fear homelessness).

Strange simultaneity--just the day before I saw HIGH SCHOOL, a production at Berkeley High created in collaboration with Antenna Theater, in which you walk through the school with audio tour headphones on, hearing the voices of the students. I think the live action could have been further integrated and elaborated upon, and I thought the physical design elements a bit weak (though a few of the puppets and masks were gorgeous)--sadly, just the simplicity of walking through the geography with that soundscape informing what you see, so precisely synced, and relinquishing your control and being commanded through--that was such a dreamlike, pleasurable experience--the live action seemed a bit superfluous.

Unto These Hills--Updated!

2006-10-30T08:02:00.000-08:00

There are times when blogging really pays off.

In June, I wrote about the recent big changes happening at Unto These Hills, an outdoor drama in Cherokee, NC. They were finally updating the racist 50-year old script.

This weekend, I received a thorough, measured review of the new production by Keith Best, a former cast member of the old show, who also blogs at Castle of Stink. He currently teaches at Francis Marion University in South Carolina.

(It makes me feel so excited to get this email--like I have a network of spies nationally to see plays and slip me information. Please, if I really have any readers, send me things like this! Blogging is awesome!)

Perhaps I have to set up the context of Outdoor Dramas and their general set of techniques and storytelling style a little more before you know why this is so very interesting, but I don't have time. This is long, but it's my blog, and I think it's fascinating, so there! I'm putting Keith in italics--bold emphasis is mine.

Generally, he descrbes the play as "non-traditional"

...sort of a spectacle-driven, surrealistic, postmodern, deconstructionist view of the old script...

With a greater emphasis on dance

...birds, eagle dance, hoop dance...some of them are certainly spectacular. Lots of lighting effects, sound effects, costumes. The dances seem to have a base of traditional native American footwork, but then contemporary modern movement is added on top of that.

The play structure?

...retained a very basic structure from the old Kermit Hunter script, but just barely.

It seems like they sliced the old script to ribbons, and maintained as major characters only the two Cherokee leads, Kenati and Selu. In Act I, serving as narrators, they tromp through the action of the old story and

are outside of the action of the story when it is told, with a few exceptions. Given that any other characters in the play appear for only a few moments, there is no one character with whom the audience can identify.

We see Major Davis for a moment. We see de Soto for a moment. We see Andrew Jackson for a moment. However, all three of these appear for a very short time and are played by native American actors—the result is these characters have no real depth.

This choice is interesting because it becomes a play about the Cherokee experience (somewhat) as told from the Cherokee point-of-view--therefore, we don't see Major Davis, but the native-American representation of Davis.

This juxtaposition is interesting, but it bothered me that the representation of Davis is also using the words from Kermit's old script. This bit of info, of course, is missed by almost everyone but those very familiar with the old show, but it adds a layer of irony that almost comes across as sarcasm.

It doesn't help that most of the actors in these small roles were barely competent. They walked stiffly and had little vocal range. As a result, these roles appeared to be characterizations, rather than characters with any sense of reality. Given that native-Americans have been portrayed as stereotypical characterizations rather than fully drawn characters for most of cinematic history, this choice, though understood, seems a step backwards to me.

Act I ends with the Trail of Tears:

The intermission came in the middle of what would have been the old scene 12 climax. We get a Trail of Tears told in tableau style, so there is a sense of the entire trail rather than just the beginning, but there are no characters to which we've established a connection, so it's more like an interactive museum display than a dramatic presentation...

Act Two starts with Selu, our female narrator, weeping about the Trail of Tears...

Granted this isn't traditional storytelling, but if the Trail of Tears should be the climax of the show, then it bothers me that the climax is interrupted by the intermission. I'm sure it's Hanay’s writing/directorial choice, but it’s a very Brechtian one.

This is followed by a local young Cherokee, Alyssa Sampson, sing a cappela. It is:

the purest emotional moment of the show...it connects the sorrow of the people with the tragedy of the Trail of Tears.

After that, the "play" or "narrative" is finished:

The rest of act two is basically a celebration in dance and music. We see traditional Cherokee costumes onstage, and then cast members slowly appear on stage in modern clothes. The mixture of the "new day, old day" is lovely, but this convention seems out of place without having been introduced earlier in the show and is likely to confuse this audience....It feels like a different show now.

...there is a hoedown and a hoop dance mixing all these time periods together...the hoop dance was basically traditional, though not particularly good hoop dancing--it was almost a stylized eagle dance with hoops held on the shoulders like wings—and was done under black lights...It probably didn't help that one of the dancers was stumbling and had difficulty with timing, though he clearly knew the choreography. Still, though, there seemed to be a lot of joy and fun in these performances in the second half...

Keith certainly had some strong notes:

Dream-like, in fact, is a good description of the "feel" for the whole show. Pacing was really slow (annoyingly so, at times). I can't imagine this slow pacing wasn't a directorial choice, but for the most part, the performers lacked the energy and presence to maintain a slow pace without it seeming "lazy."

The actor playing Kenati was exceptional. The actress playing Selu was not as strong. She stumbled over lines way too much (but that may be due to the fact that rewrites continue) and didn't seem to have the presence to fill the large stage as well.

He also has a terrific sense of the show's shape as a whole:

Responses To Responses

2006-10-27T18:58:00.000-07:00

1. Excellent point, Parabasis, that I fell into the trap (which I myself hate) of some nostalgia fantasy of "when things were better." Who knows if things were better? Probably there was just as much crap in the 60s downtown or in the heydey of vaudeville--and we just know about what was worth remembering.

But I vehemently disagree about "Thing" being so difficult to achieve. Right now, I'm teaching in East Oakland--my kids have moments and minutes and small stretches of Thing all the time. I love the rehearsal process the most when I direct, because it's a long stretches of Thing-making. Thing is easy.

Creating a collaborative live art piece in which Thing is sustained, anchored to a greater live event that tells a more complex story, is intellectually and politically honest and interesting, and can be repeated--that's what's so hard. That's why, for every rare play that sparkles with life, it's the even rarer one which is truly Great.

The question is, why do so few plays sparkle with life? Why the un-dead?

Demanding radiant engagement is not anti-art--radiant engagement is the process of making art. Sometimes that engagement leads to art which is confused, overreaches, doesn't succeed, is uneven, loses relevance. I don't care about that. What pisses me off is the lack of rigorous engagement you see in regional theater hacks and experimental poseurs, art's equivalent of Celebrity Dead Eye.

2. "A replica is a replica and there is no point in believing in utopias that will never be delivered."

Bryan has a lovely post which brings up a problem which also stretches across aisles across America--the obsession with "authenticity." It dogs all kinds of art and culture--it hits theater the hardest in terms of performance and acting--from the attempts to create hyper-naturalist living rooms or waterworks soap opera emotional pornography or the misguided "Theater of Awkwardness" where pretentious hipsters conflate discomfort and non-actory lack of craft with "the real."

I'm not a believer that form is the answer. I like Parabasis' friend Malachy Walsh's statement that "aesthetic choices are the wardrobe for ideas." We have so much to play with at this point--what a gift--can you imagine when breaking the fourth wall was important?

Update Postponed: Thing, Part II

2006-10-26T11:07:00.001-07:00

Dan Trujillo has a thoughtful response to Mr. Feingold, requesting further precision--go read it.

And I guess I would respond by saying: yes, Feingold is general, because it is generally that big of a problem. So what is the "it" that's such a problem? you ask and quite rightly, be specific!

I will sound vague. But it's a stunning lack of the Thing, which I've written about before. You know, the Thing. When the play is Thingy, when artistic choices are actually unfolding and we're in the same room and the room vibrates, and it's very exciting because you know that the artists are not compromising their complete pursuit of a story or obsession or idea or genre or theory.

In the three full years of living and making work in New York, I saw only four--no, five--plays there that hit the Thing. And I saw a lot of fucking plays.

1. Ivo von Hove's production of Streetcar Named Desire at New York Theater Workshop.
2. The '99 revival of Kiss Me Kate, the only time I saw a Broadway musical and understood the magic that B'way must once have been.
3. A shockingly stirring production of an otherwise simplistically constructed play called The Trial of One Shortsighted Black Woman vs. Mammy Louise and Safreeta Mae. I know, it's I Ain't Yo Uncle all over again, but really, it was one of the most alive, exciting, things I've ever seen.
4. Target Margin's Seagull was just dripping with Thing from the first moment.
5. Matt Wilder's Secret History of the Lower East Side had slabs of Thing in it.

[Just wanted to add to the post that I left NYC in 2001, people. But I still remember with startling specificity every single Thingy play I saw--because it was so rare and surprising.]

Of course, the Wooster Group is always and entirely Thingy, but they're such a fait accomplit that they don't even count.

Now that I think about it, Thing = RADIANT ENGAGEMENT THAT COMES FROM THE ARTIST'S DESIRE TO COMMUNICATE/INTERROGATE USING THE MEDIUM OF LIVE PERFORMANCE. Isn't that the bare-assed minimum we should be able to expect from theater? If a play can't even hit that, what's the goddamn point?

It isn't a genre problem. It's a problem throughout the American theater. I see it in the so-called "avant garde"/"experimental". I see it on Broadway, in the regional theaters, in the universities, in fringe fests and amphitheaters, in community-based theater, political theater, revivals, Shakespeare plays, musicals, performance art, "physical" theater, theater created with Viewpoints and Strassberg and Stanislavski and a hope and a prayer. A void of Thing. A huge gaping hole lack of Thing.

Yet, it has become so rare for a theater production to have Thing, that even when a play is flawed or intellectually lazy, or has an inconsistent script, or is politically meh, or makes artistic choices that I think aren't very interesting, I will forgive it. I will forgive all for Thing. Jesus, it has become a luxury to be able to even have that kind of conversation about a play.

What Feingold hit on for me is what I am so lonely for: theater with something to say and do and make, that knows why it's live and why it exists, why it's important that the material is presented as theater or live art and not any other medium.

Bold, sincere, rigorous use of the medium. Combination of craft and intellect asking the difficult, unsolveable questions, creating art, creating that wonderful moment when things don't get solved or get made easy for us. Theater that asks something of its audience, that asks something of itself. Surprise. Wonder. Glorious manipulation. Fellowship. Confrontation.

Theater that isn't so collapsed to the apparatus that it doesn't even try, because it has already settled for being more of the same.

This has become a ramble. Does it help?

i've been saying this for years--

2006-10-24T08:21:00.000-07:00

The irascible and honest Mr. Feingold tells it like it is in this week's Village Voice. (Thanks for the link, Matt). Such a relief to see someone say it in print, I can't tell you.

I haven't been writing because I've been very busy--teaching, getting the company together, working on projects. Longer update to come.

why / why not

2006-09-17T11:14:00.000-07:00

So it's an amazing moment, when it works. When it "comes together." My mom hates that phrase, it reeks of something new-agey and higher power to her, things she despises, and she tells me how throughout her PhD., colleagues would reassure her, "Devorah, don't worry, it will come together," and she hated that, but then, towards the end, clockwork and just as they said it would, of course, it came together.

I once watched Glenn Close on "In the Actors' Studio," a hack show if there ever was one and I wonder about the impact it has on the cultural imagination of America w/r/t actors--but anyway, she described great theater as "changing the molecules in the room."

I feel that when it happens, I do, it's true, I'm not kidding, the air literally changes weight and texture, the room vibrates differently, you are in an alternate world. We only had four shows. For the first two, the room didn't change. The last two, it came together. How can almost all the pieces be the same, be exactly the same--and be such dramatically different shows? How can that happen?

the fall has already begun

2006-08-31T09:49:00.000-07:00

"Banana Bag & Bodice proudly introduces to the worthy city of San Francisco the legendary heroes of the no-wave post-sludge punk scene, The Rising Fallen. Six years ago they catastrophically unleashed their unrehearsed guitar steel and the drum-tense electro-dense vocals of their never before spoken lead singer. The concert hall ended in flames and all present suffered irreversable mental damage.
Oh God."

I'm directing this one.

Please come, we have four shows, they will sell out.

SF Fringe Festival
EXIT on Taylor
277 Taylor Street
(between Eddy & Ellis)

Wednesday Sept. 6 @ 8:30 PM
Thursday Sept. 7 @ 7:00 PM
Friday Sept. 8 @ 8:30 PM
CANCELLED: Saturday Sept. 9 @ 2:30 PM THE FALL HAS ALREADY BEGUN
CANCELLED: Sunday Sept. 10 @ 5:30 PM THE FALL HAS ALREADY BEGUN
Monday Sept. 11 @ 10:00 PM

A rare moment

2006-08-25T18:20:00.000-07:00

I saw three great plays in 3 years of living in New York. No one believes less in the outdated myth that NY is the center of Great American Theater than me. But gosh, I wish I was there right now so I could see:

Meryl in Mother Courage (though I'm not as into the Papa Brecht era of his plays, and the production apparently has not much else to recommend it. SFJ says: "When she acts, it seems as if nobody else on stage has read the script.")

Lance Reddick in a revival of August Wilson's Seven Guitars. Partly because it sounds like a beautiful production, and partly because, as a passionate fan of The Wire, I just want to be in the same room as Mr. Reddick.

Kiki and Herb. On Broadway. I mean, fucking duh.

some wow news

2006-08-25T11:29:00.000-07:00

Bill Rauch named new Artistic Director at Ashland.

oh, p.s., why I care:
Bill was the founding Artistic Director and Director for Cornerstone Theater Company, a company that has changed the landscape of American theater in the past 20 years. I assisted for Bill as an Altvater Fellow and found him a director of near-saintly grace, able to take notes and ideas from everyone from the star to the UPS man and synthesize it, while also able to give notes to the most persnickety and sensitive of actors. I'm delighted for him and for the OSF.

entirely personal

2006-08-13T13:37:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I got engaged. I'm over the moon--but that isn't surprising. What's been astonishing is the outpouring of joy from friends and family. My friend Rachel, three weeks away from her own wedding, tells me that she feels an engagement or wedding gives your community both permission and a specific moment to express their delight and approval over your relationship.

I bring this up in reference to something else, something terrible. Israeli writer David Grossman's son died in Lebanon on Saturday. Uri Grossman was 20, a tank commander, three months from finishing his service.

David Grossman is one of the most sensitive, acute thinkers, activists and writers in Israel and on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In last week's NY Times Magazine article, Bernard-Henri Lévy called him one of Israel's moral consciences--this is true. That his son would be the 24th soldier to die is the rare irony that creates not wry distance but rather immediate devastation.

My own response, of course, is entirely personal--Vered and I had the privilege of co-translating two of his novels. My family is Israeli, and the past month I've been on edge, nervous, scared, angry. I'm confronted continuously with Bay Area liberals who, paradoxically, do not know how to demonstrate for peace without picking a side to root for (that being, whomever they consider the underdog). They call Israelis, not Hezbollah, terrorists. Both of my cousins who have been called for reserve duty are fathers of newborn children.

I now have a chance to mourn the tragedy of the past month. I can cry, can feel entirely as sad as I've been feeling. I would anything that it weren't so.

meep out of nowhere

2006-08-04T11:10:00.000-07:00

I've been purposely ignoring the blog while trying to organize and compartmentalize the projects that I hope to get done in some type of parallel processing.

But couldn't resist this article in the NY Times about the actors at the American Girl store.

And also, to document that I am, for the first time, watching the Twin Peaks series. Yes, for the first time. Yes, it's just shockingly good (especially the taut beauty and weirdness of Season 1), and I can't believe it was on network TV. We're hitting the point of Season 2 where apparently things go kind of bad for a little while, but are committed to pushing through to the end.

I want to take a moment (as I begin a writing project of my own) to note my particular fondness for the character of Bobby Briggs' father, Major Garland Briggs (played by Don S. Davis).

Our expectations for this character get established immediately: he's thorougly military in bearing, portly, white, middle-aged, with a classified job and a hunky high school son in the throes of obnoxious petulant rebellion.

Almost as instantly, our expectations are turned inside out: he turns out to be the most sensitive, enlightened, dare I say saintly, characters in Twin Peaks--articulate about expressing his feelings, speaking with highly literary precision and a depth of sincere empathy few of us will ever encounter.

It's a particularly hilarious the set up and punch line establishing a character, and every time he comes on screen, I'm delighted.

It goes without saying that I'm planning to steal him, figuratively.

briefly

2006-06-30T18:27:00.000-07:00

"Today, people think who you are is all about internal psychology and what your parents are like. But it's also about your era and where you were born and your class, too, which American films hardly address at all."
--Mary Harron

So an unofficial part of this residency is watching a lot of Killer Films' movies (a pleasure, by the way). This week, I saw "Safe" for the first time, which I just think is really one a most upsetting
masterpiece, easily Todd Haynes' bestAnd we just screened "The Notorious Bettie Page," which I found quite moving. One of my fellow associates thought the film lacked conflict, that Bettie's character wasn't portrayed with enough depth. I thoroughly disagree.

I thought the film's conflict was between a woman and her era; Bettie's innate sex appeal and open sparkliness, in the time she lived in, reduced her options entirely, from her childhood onward. As I watched, I thought a lot about other beauties exploited for their sex appeal, Brigitte Bardot especially--I have this documentary of La Bardot which follows her TV variety specials, where she got to showcase her talents--as a singer, an entertainer, a ballerina. In one interview, Brigitte describes meeting Marilyn Monroe, how fragile and lovely she was, with a young child's innocence--she talks about how the hungry world used and destroyed Marilyn, and you know she's talking about herself.

Chinese Clowns, Redux...

2006-06-26T18:26:00.000-07:00

Jane and her mom Tair are hitting the (mostly) Canadian Fringe circuit this summer with The Chinese Clown Cabaret, which I directed for them last summer. It is going very well (read the reviews!thanks Michael!), and if you are anywhere near there, you should really go see them--they've already done Montreal and Ottowa, but they have more to come:

St-Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival
www.montrealfringe.ca

Ottawa Fringe Festival
www.ottawafringe.com

Berkshire Fringe Festival
www.berkshirefringe.org

WHERE
Daniel Arts Center, Simon's Rock College
84 Alford Road, Great Barrington, MA
TICKETS: $15 413.320.4175

WHEN
Tuesday, August 1, 8:00 pm (includes a post-show talkback)
Wednesday, August 2, 8:00 pm
Friday, August 4, 8:00 pm

Edmonton Fringe Festival
August 17-27, 2006
www.fringetheatreadventures.ca

Victoria Fringe Festival
August 24 - September 4, 2006
www.intrepidtheatre.com

Vancouver Fringe Festival
September 7-17, 2006
www.vancouverfringe.com

brief reviews from over the last two months

2006-06-16T12:21:00.000-07:00

Movies (the first three I watched on the plane)
Match Point
Woody hates women and has only contempt for the world he spent his entire life aspiring to, which leaves a bad taste in viewer's mouth (even though his filmmaker's skill, once the movie turns into a thriller, is undeniable). Unfortunately for Scarlett Johanssen, her breasts are the only expressive part of her.

Walk The Line
Pointless, cheesy, terrible biopic, how did it win anything? Sarah Vowell gets the heart of the story across better in 10 minutes with her nasally voice than the entire 3 hours of high-budget Hollywood schlock.

Pride and Prejudice
Admirable adaptation of an impossible task. Non-Austen fans will never know what's missing, and that's too bad.

Poison
Why don't more people take chances and make movies like this? Especially now with DV! Rough around the edges, you can tell it's cheap, but so ambitious and tremendous, who cares? It felt like great poor theater. My favorite part, the mock documentary.

Brokeback Mountain
Got under my skin more than I thought it could; I'll never think of Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams as just pretty faces ever again.

Books
Fun Home
Alison Bechdel's graphic novel tracing her relationship with her dead father. Gorgeous canvas for her talent, best memoir I've read in awhile, go buy it.

Da Vinci Code
Reads like a bad film treatment, undeniably absorbing page-turner.

World Cup
Commentators JP Dellacamera and John Harkes: The only American commentators worth listening to. The other ones should be taken out, beaten with sticks, and never allowed to call a soccer game ever, ever again.

Bastian Schweinsteiger
German midfielder. His name means "Pig-Mounter", but that's ok, because I love him, he makes me root for Germany.

Atlantic Center for the Arts
I think it might be impossible for artists residencies to get better than this one.

Don't Even Get Me Started on the Myth of the Young Male Genius...

2006-06-15T19:27:00.000-07:00

I guess I'm so disconnected from New York at this point that this year's Obies came and went last month without my noticing (I don't care about the Tonys--only would have written about 'em had Lisa Kron won for Well).

Sheila Callaghan is a New York based playwright--her "riff" on Ulysses, Dead City, just opened at New Georges. And she wrote about this a month ago, on her blog (wow! there are blogs on theater! Here! And here! And, oh, gosh, here! (hi Daniel! Remember when you wrote that awesome stuff about your time at modo in haiku for me and Jen Mitas when we were doing Living Newspaper in 2001?! Hi!)). She wrote:

...at the Obie awards Monday night, the award for "playwriting" went to Rolin Jones and Martin McDonagh. The award for "emerging artist" went to Rinne Groff and Neena Beber.

Rolin Jones won for The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow, his first play. Neena Beber, who has been doing this for twenty years, won an emerging playwright award.

Now I am certain Mr. Jones deserves an award for his lovely play. I am sure Ms. Beber does as well. I say this with absolute sincerity and respect. But I am also certain that something ugly lies within the distinction between Best Playwright and Best New Playwright, when two of the awardees should so clearly be reversed.

So I have this fantasy that I am Neena Beber, and when they call my name I walk up to the microphone and say, "I appreciate that you like my play, and that you acknowledge my existence in this field… but you can take your fucking Obie and shove it in your goddamn gender-biased twat."

Ms. Callaghan goes on to say more...go read it. Also, Juliana F. responds with this comment, which I'm printing and taping to my wall:

Here's my checklist: 1. Get mad, read and talk and write about it. 2. Avoid the bitterness and despair that can slow or stop your work, make up prayers to alchemize your outrage into writing better plays. 3. Write these better plays faster than you were writing them before. 4. If you write great stuff but you are shite at promoting your work due to gender trauma, do at least one uncomfortable but good business thing a week to break that lousy habit, for 21 weeks in a row. 5. Do something for young girls, or for women more marginalized than yourself. Do some volunteer tutoring through NY Cares; send a little scratch to Save Darfur or the IRC, become a Penpal to a woman in prison. 6. Stand up straight, breathe through your nose, invoke Mary Wollstonecraft and other greats, and fuck that noise!!

I haven't seen a play by Ms. Callaghan, but will when I return from Floriday. Crowded Fire Theater is producing her play We Are Not These Hands at the Ashby Stage from June 23-July 16, and will update then.

What do I think? I agree with Ms. Callaghan. It's typical sexist bullshit: of course Neena Beber doesn't exist until the Voice notices her existence. Alexis, what's going on?

***
In news of admiration of the masculine body and what it can endure, I live for the World Cup. 3 games a day for the first two weeks. Jumping out of bed at 6am to watch Univision. Bliss!

Outdoor Dramas, and why I'll never write the damn book.

2006-06-12T21:48:00.000-07:00

That last post was supposed to be a short aside, and I didn't even get into a lot of things I wanted to say.

So before I forget: Four major variables determine an Outdoor Drama: the values it desires to promote; the historical story it uses to present those values; the theatrical means by which it communicates the historical story; and the relationship of the theater with its locality.

Can you imagine? Each separate variable had such a wildly diverse expression at every play I went to, that the synthesis of all four variables per play created 27 totally disparate animals. Each event was so unique, that there wasn't even a single way to tell every story.

The things I didn't write about below:

The many ways they do actually paint white boys red
The narrative pretzels Outdoor Dramas twist themselves into trying to make everyone the good guy so that neither whites nor the people they oppressed are offended (though of course, that in itself is offensive)
Reasons that so many Outdoor Dramas and pageants emerged in communities post-World War II (e.g., Legend of Rawhide)
The phenomenon of Greater Tuna
John Rollins Ridge, and the mythical outlaw Joaquin Murrieta
Recent innovations of historical museum curation and presentation
The story told to me by the former head of the Institute of Outdoor Drama about companies whose business was to stage pageants for towns, and his job at a tobacco town

Unto These Hills

2006-06-12T20:19:00.000-07:00

In the midst of working through some complicated (for me, anyway) thoughts about history and Miss Saigon--so in the meantime, some exciting news (for me, anyway) about theater and historical representation:

This year, there are radical changes afoot at Unto These Hills, an outdoor drama that has been running for 57 years in Cherokee, North Carolina. Hanay Geiogamah, playwright, founder of American Indian Dance Theater, Native American Theater Ensemble, and Project Hoop, UCLA professor and editor of American Indian Theater in Performance: A Reader, has completely rewritten and restaged the play, now using a cast of 75% local people.

There are no words for how happy this makes me. Unto These Hills was a particularly embarrassing specimin of Americana when I visited in 2001, on a three month long road trip documenting historical and religious outdoor dramas in the U.S.

Historical Outdoor Dramas (annually performed, site-specific theatrical spectacles) tend to be creation myths, celebrating and performing the origins of a localities as we know them (or as local people would like to have them known). Thus, one running theme of my road-trip and a continuing problem of the genre was the representation of Native Americans. How do you justify and celebrate a nation's stories when they're built on the bones of whole destroyed races? Nasty savage or noble savage? And just how are you going to paint them white boys red, anyway?^

These questions were answered in as many different ways as the plays. You can even use the plays to trace 70 years of the Indian in American cultural consciousness, as some still use original scripts from the 1930s; most updated themselves piece-meal; and a few, finally feeling the currents of what has been a historical tsunami of increased political consciousness, buoyed themselves into complete reinvention.

On my travels, two plays most clearly held up the polarities of the continuum: Unto These Hills* in Cherokee, NC; and Trail of Tears, in Tahlequah, OK. The former town is home to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee nation, descendents of those who managed to hide out and avoid resettlement along the Trail of Tears--the latter is where the Trail landed the Cherokee.

Both original productions (the former, which told the story leading up to the expulsion; and the latter, tracing the expulsion and its aftermath) were written by the same playwright: Kermit Hunter, one of the Carolina Playmakers out of UNC-Chapel Hill, birthplace of the Outdoor Drama movement.

I visited Trail of Tears first. The amphitheater had been dark for four years, as the audience for a poor production of a hopelessly outdated script had, understandably, waned. In 2001, they hired Joe Sears, half-Cherokee playwright of the Greater Tuna trilogy (that's another story), to write it--they had a local Native American turned big-time actor (I think he was in "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman") direct it--and got the signoff of the Cherokee nation.

The play told the story of the removal and its continuing trauma quite bluntly, using a charming framing device of Thanksgiving Night at the Ziegfeld Follies, where Will Rogers (famous Oklahoman and Cherokee) is starring. Girls begin toparade out, dressed as squaws and pumpkins, when the electricity goes on the fritz. Forced to entertain the crowd, Rogers tells the tale of Stand Watie and John Ross:

The treaty used by the US to forced Cherokee removal was not recognized either by the Cherokee Tribal government or the majority of the Nation; it had been signed by a small cadre of prosperous Cherokee farmers and businessmen (including Watie and his father) who figured that expulsion by whites was inevitable and they might as well cut their losses. This betrayal inevitably led to bloody acts of vengeance and power struggles for years afterwards (with the side impact on John Rollins Ridge, who went on to write Joaquin Murrieta, but that's another story).

Trail of Tears, when I saw it, still had its colt legs; its earnest anxiety to achieve historical accuracy meant it missed some opportunities for dynamic drama--but essentially, the show was a solid, admirable production; used local professional Native American performers in major roles; and ending beautifully with painted-face ghosts framing the stage, singing Amazing Grace in Cherokee.

Fast forward two weeks into my road trip, to Cherokee and Unto These Hills. The play had been running for 52 years, and the producer, an charming older man with an iron fist, made it clear to me that they had never even vaguely considered updating the script.

Watching Hunter's original script in action made me realize just why Trail of Tears had no choice but to undergo such a radical transformation. Hunter told the story as dumb, innocent natives being hornswoggled by whites through a corrupt preacher. Voice-over narrations described the Indians' as "primitive" and "simple" in their connection to nature. There are exotic dances that seem entirely made-up. The protagonists with the most stage time are stock characters in Outdoor Dramas: the kindly honest white folks. The production exacerbated the problem: local Cherokee were used in the most perfunctory, pandering, and thematically offensive way (aka, during the scene when the Preacher cheats those simple Injuns, the simple Injuns were played by solely women and children locals).

Of course Hunter meant to be sympathetic to the Cherokee, I think, but he did so in the only way he knew how: by painting the white folk's cruelty as dog kicking, as opposed to dispossessing a nation, a developed functioning culture of productive (and quite assimilated) human beings. It was terribly, terribly offensive.

Especially considering that just down the hill was a recently renovated Museum of the Cherokee Indian. Some day I'll write about what has clearly been a dramatic leap forward in historical museum curation and presentation, but for now, let me just recommend the Cherokee Musuem as an outstanding collection of exhibits, covering 12,000 years of Cherokee history and culture intelligently, innovatively, explicitly and attractively.

To my shock, none of the actors I had spoken to had visited the museum once. The museum and drama had, in fact, begun as different limbs of the same organization. A schism had set them on separate courses, and they moved forward with no connection or communication: the museum resolutely making progress, and the drama, equally resolutely, hovering comfortably where it was.

But the most striking, most extraordinary part of the whole thing, was the utterly disconnected actor culture [Insert actor joke here]: the production was a kind of artists' summer camp. All summer stock is, but there was this yawning chasm between the play the actors performed nightly and the life they lived on the hill behind the amphitheater, in which they did yoga and ate and partied and produced an impressive variety of cabarets.

Not one actor, from the newbie to the vet, literally had a single thing to say about Unto These Hills.

Think about it. If you're performing one play every night for three months, especially if it's specific to the geographical location, at some point, you have to think about what you're doing. Every actor in every other production I visited (and I visited 27) had thoughts, showed curiosity, a basic awareness (even if it was shallow), and had opinions about the play, the history, and the host community.

The "Indians" at Daniel Boone: The Man and the Legend underwent a sort of Native American boot camp, assiduously learning how to walk and move and behave when in character. The folks at the Blue Jacket Drama burned sage before each performance. My favorite--the actors at Kermit Hunter's Horn in the West had actually hijacked the production from under the director's nose, adding a historically researched prequel about the Regulators that artfully filled in later plot gaps in the script.

Not so at Unto These Hills. Whenever I asked about they play, they responded by talking about their artist's colony. They weren't even defensive about the atrocious, historically incorrect and politically insensitive clap trap on the stage--the play was a vacuum, a lacuna; it might have well not existed in their aerie.

In fact, the only reason I heard about the recent new brooms sweeping through the place is because the Atlanta actors from Merry Wives have friends who are out of the cushy summer gig they had come to presume upon.

My congratulations to Hanay Geiogamah and Unto These Hills--I wish I could see it--it's long overdue.

process, product, risk and "physical theater"

2006-06-06T08:19:00.000-07:00

Lisa Drostova of the East Bay Express, in her recent review of Theater de la Jeune Lune's production of The Miser asks why we don't see more "intensely physical theater" in the East Bay, why it is that when we do see it, it comes from outside companies like Jeune Lune and Culture Clash and Mary Zimmerman's ensemble productions.

"Most of our houses simply don't go as far as the companies that visit," Drostova writes, blaming it on a "Stanislavskian fixation on text analysis."

The real answer is far simpler and more obvious:

Most theater houses put up a play in 4-6 weeks. That means there's no time for much of anything other than getting the show on its feet to the best effect possible.

I saw it in Merry Wives: the people working on it were so good--they were being paid to be that good full-time, and showed up having done their homework, prepared and thoughtful. A few of the puppeteers had experience working together in Atlanta, and their shared training helped tremendously. There was no way the show would be terrible. But it wouldn't be utterly brilliant, either--how could it? By the very nature of the regional theater schedule, it didn't take the risks that come with completely committing, full-time, to a process. When a group doesn't have the shared time with which to put a show together, the result simply will not be a "Total Play" with dynamic physical consistency, complexity, oomph.

That happens when companies have time to work together, to build a common, specific physical and emotional and visual language both onstage for plays and offstage in training. That's why dance companies take classes together multiple times a week. Culture Clash has been working together for 22 years. Jeune Lune has been doing its thing together since 1978, with all three founding artists having gone to Lecoq together. Such groups (let us not forget my fave) generally have a rotating repertory of plays, which have been developed over YEARS by the time they get to a run at the Berkeley Rep or whatever.

Theater critics need to write about these pragmatic realities when they attempt to interrogate the artistic results. People who watch theater need to know about the pragmatic realities when they begin to see plays.

assisting

2006-05-24T11:57:00.000-07:00

So I'm assisting Sean Daniels on The Merry Wives of Windsor at CalShakes. They're doing the show with puppets--only the two couples (Masters and Mistresses Ford and Page) as humans.

It's a wham-bang good time show--pure, straight-to-the-veins comedy. I didn't think it could be--the play is really one of Shakespeare's least important--an Elizabethan-era episode of South Park--and how can you get farce and all those outdated references across, without human bodies? Answer: text cuts, Master Puppet Badass John Ludwig's astonishingly expressive puppets, and an incredible cast (humans and puppeteers alike).

I've watched them do certain bits at least 100 times, and it's still funny. One bit made me laugh so hard when they staged it, I cried--Sean was thinking of cutting it, because it's a bit crude, shall we say--and then, in tech, he laughed so hard he fell backwards off the wall he was perched on. It's staying in.

The cast (Lorna Howley, Max Moore, George "Googie" Uterhardt, Spencer Stephens, Danny Schiele, Ron Campbell as Falstaff, Big-Bird-like, in an eight-foot body-puppet suit, and the humans: Anthony Fusco, Catherine Castellanos, Delia MacDougall, and Liam Vincent) are total pros: talented, trained, consistent, hard-working--they do their homework carefully, are generous with each other on- and offstage. The design looks terrific. CalShakes production and management is a small busy army of hyper-competent folks.

Tech was four full nights in the freezing outdoor cold until 12:30am (then, production meetings)--the great Dave Malloy did the sound design, and as the show is a sort of live cartoon, there are 450 sound cues in the show that had to be teched. It took for fucking ever.

I know the show's going to be great. So go see it, you'll enjoy it.

tel aviv: good

2006-05-14T18:13:00.001-07:00

Not all was lost, of course.

1. Bauhaus Center of Tel Aviv. During the 1930s and 1940s, Tel Aviv's population exploded with immigrants and became a city; the most prominent architects at the time were students of European functional modernism, and over 4,000 buildings designed in the Bauhaus-inspired International Style went up over 20 years, most of which are still standing. In 2003, Tel Aviv received UNESCO status for its local architecture, and people are beginning to renovate, and appreciate, some of the very run-down buildings--though run down or not, the bones are beautiful. Ben and I took a tour of the architecture, and it was amazing.

2. Tel Aviv Museum of Art:
Michal Rovner's video art is OUTSTANDING. I've never seen video manipulated and integrated so nimbly into sculpture. She had all of these "ancient" objects--slabs of rock, stone bowls, crumbled pottery; they appear to have complex circles of ancient human figures painted on them--you come close and see that the figures are moving, dancing, posing in place, coagulating, separating. So delicious, so perfect a way to end our visit in a country where the ancient and modern live in such stark relief.

Very provocative photo/video exhibit on the Disengagement from Gaza as well.

Also:
3. Israel Museum. Solid Contemporary Japanese Art exhibit--nothing earth-shattering in the curation, but a strong general overview. Motoi Yamamoto used salt for a sculpture that took up a whole room--a meditation on death where the salt was used to draw labyrinths and ended in snowy mountains. Beautiful.

tel aviv: bad

2006-05-06T10:28:00.000-07:00

Just spent the past two weeks in Israel with Ben and family. My cousin, Vered Tom, with whom I co-translated Be My Knife and Someone To Run With, is back in Tel Aviv--juggling a bunch of balls (creating a show, some dramaturgy, lit management, research for a documentary TV station, pretty extensive editing for a book Shimon Peres is writing.)

Of course, given our great success seeing performance in Hong Kong, I asked her to find us some dance--it's the home of Bat Sheva and an exciting little scene of small companies. But it was a bad week--the Suzanne Dallal Center, otherwise THE venue for dance, had a one-acts festival occupying the space, people (incl. Vered) are gearing up for the Israel Festival in Jerusalem.

So we went to Tmuna Theatre, a small complex that's pretty much like HERE in New York--for some dance and video art. Which sucked.

What's funny is that the way in which it sucked made it clear that shitty art that thinks itself "avant garde" is the same the world over--humorless artists in black pursuing meaningless and lame abstraction lacking any narrative or thematic purpose. The first piece? Generated with bad contact improv and unfiltered theater games, natch, with a touch of kink. 12 minutes of poorly post-produced video (hey, friend, a quick tip: if it's shot horribly, no amount of Adobe Premiere will save it) of people submersing themselves in the sea at night.

Vered took me to see some bad community storytelling a couple of days later. Yawn.

Miss Saigon, Part Deux: Watching PLATOON and FULL METAL JACKET Back-to-Back

2006-04-03T17:28:00.000-07:00

So.

We had a movie-fest as part of our Miss Saigon research that involved a night of watching clips of: First Blood, Rambo: First Blood II, The Green Berets, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, The Deerhunter, Heaven and Earth, and Vietnam: A Television History. I thought it would be a fun night--there was cooking and wine and pizza and everything--but somehow, it was kind of a bummer. Imagine that.

The day after, I watched the whole of Full Metal Jacket and Platoon. I had never seen either, and somehow was surprised that the former came out after the latter--was, in fact, Kubrick's penultimate film. It seemed like it must have been older, too big, too important to have only come out in 1987 (though that is almost 20 years ago). And it makes sense--watching Full Metal Jacket made me feel that there's no reason to ever make another movie about American soldiers during Vietnam--if it had come out before, Platoon never would have seen the light of day.

In American theater theory, there is an established (in fact, canonical, though of course any practicioner can poke a million holes in it) divide: that which is Brechtian, and that which is Stanislavskian. This was initially applied more directly to academic deconstructions of acting theory, but has long become a more general trope. By Stanislavskian, academics generally actually mean "Strassbergian" or "Method," and are often sloppy about making that distinction. But what does it mean?

It's hard to be brief about this, as it has characterized much of the debate about American theater for the past decades, but I'll try.

The latter, the "Method," (as the trope goes...) is that which believes in acting, or theater, as being a delivery mechanism for a certain kind of emotional experience. You, as the actor, to disappear into the character, "be" the character, experience his emotions. When the audience witness this experience, witness you actually experiencing the emotions, they will have a mimetic emotional experience, feel what you're feeling; and undergo catharsis, an emotional payoff.

Brecht thought this was very bad--for the audience to come in, sit back, and sail through a passive, delivered emotional experience. Instead, he believed in theater that made the familiar strange by putting a story in a heightened sociopolitical context. This applied to acting as well--instead of pretending to "be" the character, you instead are a sort of actor-reporter. This had a major impact on the American experimental theater of the 1960s and the performance art that followed--which promoted the awareness that you are the actor and the audience is present as the audience and you are performing for them.

This is a much larger discussion, of course, to be attacked historically, theoretically, in terms of craft. I mean, Stanislavksi's technique and pursuits are different than Strassberg's mistranslation of such things into "Method" with its emphasis on emotional recall. Strassberg destroyed a generation of American actors--and American theater itself, which followed a downward spiral of living room naturalism and stifled performance that stifled the magic of theater at its core.

Academics, or more likely, performance theorists, like to make Brecht=good and Stanislavksi=bad in simplistic fashion doesn't take into account the abstraction of high melodrama or the emotionality Brecht uses or the difference between what actual performer craft requires for a flexible instrument and what said instrument is put in service of onstage. And both end up with dangerous fall-out over what it means for something to be "the real" or "the authentic."

I bring this whole kettle of fish up only appropos of Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. Because, for all that it's a shopworn spine of theory that must be constantly taken apart--the two movies, set side by side, prove it. They are almost perfect exemplars of the two extremes as characterized by theater academics: Platoon as Strassberg, sentimentality, emotionality, the mimetic experience; Full Metal Jacket as Brecht--cold, politically astute, narratively disjointed so that each section or scene is highlighted, violent.

As someone who associates Oliver Stone with Natural Born Killers, I was shocked to see that in the earlier part of his career, he just wanted to be Spielberg. Platoon is pure melodrama, its assiduously recreated verité compromised by a chiaschuoro set-up and subsequent unfoldings: innocent Chris (Charlie Sheen), an impossibly fresh-faced white kid, lands in a war zone, and is caught between two fathers: Sgt. Barnes (Tom Berenger), a hopelessly bitter man whose filter against evil has disintegrated years ago, big scar on his face in case you missed the point, who wants nothing but the death of Jesus--er, I mean, Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe).

Jesus--sorry, Elias--is cool. He hangs out with the black soldiers, smoking dope and playing soul records, is the model of fairness and kindness and good management, and, per Rambo, really knows the jungle*; while Barnes plays cards with his whitey hicks listening to uptight country music and is great at killing people and dropping favors to his lackeys. Evil Barnes attempts to kill Saintly Elias, who finally dies as Jesus in a hail of enemy gunfire, and our hero, Chris, flips to the dark side ("I am your father, Luke") by killing Barnes in a post-battle moment of revenge madness.

At the end, as Chris is being airlifted out of hell and into a hospital, his voiceover tells us he continues to fight between Barnes and Elias, between good and evil--and that battle is within himself. You don't say.

Platoon is sentimental, deals in stereotype, and ultimately attempts to take the political and make it personal, squeeze the entire Vietnam War into the emotional experience of one man, our hero, an obvious stand-in for Stone. The infuriating "Making Of" featurette that accompanied the DVD amplified the problematics: it tells, in parallel, the story of the Vietnam War with the story of the making of Platoon, divided into sections like and "Deployment" and "Coming Home," the actors discussing the true hardships of the intensive boot camp they underwent, as if the two experiences could be considered equivalent.

A year later, we have Full Metal Jacket, which must have blasted a hole in Stone's head when it came out. Pauline Kael thought it an atrociously dehumanized kraftwerk that showed just how cut off Stanley Kubrick had become from any connection to people.

It is purely Brechtian. Everything, every moment is politically contextualized, heightened in its theatricality. Buffoonery and brutality are used in equal measure. The narrative is broken from plot causality (a leads to b) and into scenic events that force the audience to constantly question itself, which side it is on. The audience has to make the movie, connect the dots, work, constantly. The images are entirely uncomfortable. It's a Vietnam "Mann Ist Mann," showing how a man can become a machine, how an elephant is an elephant.

And I agree to some extent with Kael (she's always so spot on**), but it somehow seems so appropriate to the material (as opposed to Eyes Wide Shut, where that disconnection had become just embarrassing). Maybe I'm a sucker for his "moviemaking carried to a technical extreme to the reach for supreme control of his material," maybe I located too much humanity in certain segments he puts forward: the camaraderie of the soldiers, the angular discomfort of the hooker about to be gang-banged, the final sequence, where the soldiers are confused and keep losing each other and making mistakes, Joker's dry, survivalist humor.

Kael's criticisms perhaps are apt, however, now that I think about it. Because Stanislavski vs. Brecht, Platoon vs. Full Metal Jacket aside, neither came close to watching Vietnam: A Television History--which I also viewed, not in its entirety, but quite a bit of. There, the simple reporter-like descriptions--even from the soldiers themselves describing, in completely unemotional, matter-of-fact fashion, the heightened sense of excited awareness punctuated by stretches of total boredom--were far more provocative than any of Stone's histrionics or Kubrick's clever constructions. They made both films seem so hollow, so artificial--so pointless, almost.

And into what category does that go? What does that say about art's ability to ever capture or communicate experience in construction as opposed to "the real" of constructed documentary? Why do neither movie cut it next to the documentary?

*Isn't it funny that one's understanding of nature signifies"goodness" and "purity"? Can we put this one aside to ponder at a future date?

**HH, whereever you are, that copy of For Keeps is one of the most useful gifts I have ever received from anyone--it just keeps on giving.

Miss Saigon, Part The First: A Digression on the 1980s, Sub-Section/Pre-Note: WALL STREET

2006-04-03T17:04:00.000-07:00

Just briefly, since I watched both these films a week after Miss Saigon closed, so they don't necessarily apply though they will help with future context. Within a day, I watched Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room and Oliver Stone's Wall Street.

Both are conventional stories of a rise in the financial business marketplace, on the trading floor, in the corporate hive, based on the pure capitalist fantasy mindset, at the expense of the little people. Rises so meteoric, duh, that they seem to be rising as if only to fall.

Wall Street, one of Stone's earlier melodramas, repeats Platoon almost exactly in its essentials: pitting the charismatic demon dad vs. the honest blue-collar angel dad, with Charlie Sheen still struggling at the center and the cartoonish New York actor John C. McGinley as his foil. Stone is absorbed with the trappings (high class hookers with big hairsprayed bangs? Gold lame splashes on the wall? Home sushi and white wine? Darryl Hannah as interior decorator in Marilyn Monroe dress and Charlie Sheen in argyle sweater? So 80s!) and predicts the junk bond scandals of a few years later.

The Enron documentary was great--better than 95% of the liberal kook documentaries floating about these days. Beautifully shot, the story very well told--of course, the source material was a rigorously researched book, and they pieced together the footage cleverly. You can't make Skilling or Fastow or Lay sexy--they come off as what they are, entitled buffoons.

Miss Saigon, Part The First: A Digression on the 1980s, Section (b): RAMBO

2006-04-02T23:10:00.000-07:00

You know that you're aging when the music of your childhood re-emerges on the radio station. Not only because more often than not, it's becoming "classic rock," but because people your age are beginning to have the jobs making decisions about what gets played on the radio.

Our filmic research for Miss Saigon led us, unmistakably and repeatedly, to the 1980s. Of course. Enough time had passed for people to start making movies about Vietnam. So before I dig into the production itself, and what made it work and not work, what made it successful and what it has left me with in terms of my thinking about next steps and projects, permit me this digression. I will try and make it enjoyable.

I'm sure this has been written about to death by academics and fans alike, but I think that the 1980s are, more than anything else, what happened between First Blood (1982) and Rambo: First Blood II (1985). I had never seen either movie, and thought of "Rambo" as nothing more than a hypersteroided action flick with a greased up Stallone killing people. What people, I didn't have a clue about.

Like, I didn't know that First Blood, based on a novel by David Morrell, was about a severely PTSD Vietnam Vet who, on a visit to an old war buddy, ends up in an extended war flashback, chased down by a patrol of small-town policemen. It originally was to be directed by Mike Nichols and star Dustin Hoffman. In the novel, John Rambo commits suicide. That was cut out of the movie, but still--it features a haunted, big-eyed Stallone verses the narrow-minded cops and ends with him going to jail.

Three years pass--and we get Rambo: First Blood II. The movie starts with jailed Rambo, cutting stone in a quarry (very Howard Roark), which of course makes him all glisteny and built. Richard Crenna comes and releases him from jail for a special secret mission--to be dropped into Vietnam to confirm the report of, and perhaps save, recently located P.O.W.s in a camp. Rambo looks at him: "do we get to win this time?" he asks. Which, of course, is the key to the whole movie.

Rambo: First Blood II is a nakedly obvious fantasy of winning the Vietnam War--from the P.O.W.s who get to be released, to the Russians who show up only to lose, to the hot Vietnamese chick who wants to be airlifted out with Rambo back to the U.S.A. (and whose English gets alternately worse and better depending on the complexity of what her character at that moment has to communicate).

The bad guys are both the commies and the American namby-pamby government bureaucracy, guys who probably went to some Ivy League school and never fought and don't care about the vets.

The climax is the most patently absurd and hilarious. Every narrative about the Vietnam War that I read described America as doomed to failure--they couldn't contain or defeat the Viet-cong, who knew their own terrain and people too well to lose it to outsiders. The Viet-cong traversed the jungle, hid and slipped away and attacked. They couldn't win big mechanized battles, but it didn't matter--they won by wearing down the Americans.

So at the climax of First Blood II, Rambo, who apparently knows the jungle better than any Vietnamese, picks off the soldiers from the prison camp one by one, using all the tactics that the Vietnamese used to defeat the Americans--he jumps out of trees and hides in the mud and sets up traps and waits in spider-holes. And he saves every last P.O.W., and kills every last Vietnamese, and glistens and shines and climbs into a helicopter and things explode--all the good guys win good things, and the bad guys get bad things, it's uncomplicated and so jingoist and racist, so revealing in its subconscious desires that it's almost unbelievable to watch--especially given its original source text.

What happened between Rambo I and Rambo II? The 1980s. Reagan. The conservative -libertarian myth of a single man, with all his bulging muscles and self-reliance, beating hte bad guys. In as big of a spectacle as can be imagined.

Miss Saigon, Part The First: A Digression on the 1980s, Section (a): CATS

2006-04-02T21:42:00.000-07:00

The talented and acerbic Jon Lowe, who consulted on design for {The 99-Cent} Miss Saigon was recently hired to do lights for a production of Cats at Encinal High School in Alameda.

That's right. A high school production of Cats. Could you say no? I certainly couldn't.

So even though I was sick as a dog (har har) with something I can only attribute to post-show physical collapse, I went on Friday night, Liz in tow.

It wasn't as terrible as (let's be frank) I had hoped. Sure, the set was wretched (I don't know how Jon managed to light it as well as he did)--they had gotten it from some NYC scene shop, Oversized Urbanscape #8--there was barely room left on the stage for the cast of 50 cats. Who were in terrible costumes--old Deutoronomy looked like an orangutan in overalls. The mike kept cutting in and out on Skimbleshanks, and the chorus was weakly voiced and ahead of the music. "Memory", shinily sung by the girl who gets cast as the lead in everything and thanks the directors for making her "a better and more talented" person, was pumped out by the band like a shopworn burlesque house grind (regulated triplets ba-da-ba ba-da-ba ba-da-ba ba-da-ba BUMP)--which of course, it is.

Then we have the musical itself. Frank Rich's tart review from '82 basically disemboweled everything about the show, minus some cast members and the delightful stagecraft which was, at the time, fairly new--the beginning of the bombast of '80s musicals. Encinal High couldn't even attempt real production values (unlike some other schools who, according to last Saturday's Journal article about high school productions of Cats have $50,000 budgets). So it was what it was, a bit rag-tag but perfectly enjoyable. It certainly wasn't a Fiasco, and I found myself wishing I had directed these energetic, committed kids--it would have been fun.

What I was left with, though, more than my nostalgia hearing the songs for the first time in years or the giggles at seeing a high school Cats, was a sense of bemusement related to the layers of confused historicity dusting up the production.

First, you have the text, which is more English than English could be--literally. It's the American Eliot's imagined street London of the Victorian age--cats embodiying old criminals and music hall actors and roustabouts and glamour pusses.

Then, the production, which is pure 1980s. Everything--the unitard costumes, of course. The music, a successful synthesis of cliches that renders Eliot's charming poems vapid; the synth-heavy musical arrangements; the kick-ball-change choreography that emerges, unavoidably, from the music.

Who has any connection or reference to either of these things? Much less both? The fetishized Englishness that simply has no correlation to anything American kids know about--and the cheesy cheese of the 1980s (when most of the kids onstage were born in the '90s). Cats is an artifact that will simply grow more confusing as it ages, and the reason it would ever still be produced will remain more of a mystery.

Because, ultimately, Cats will never be anything more than an artifact of its time, a conflation of historically specific theatrical innovation, musical hackery, and nostalgia. Grease is a similar artifact, except with the 1970s filtering the 50s--very disco groovy.

Except that the kids love it--I mean, the little kids just loved it, were raptly attentive from start to finish. They were written as poems for children.

And hey, Cats was running on Broadway until 2000. What was I saying about theater being a museum?

spike >hearts< nyc

2006-04-02T21:24:00.000-07:00

Just saw Inside Man. Spike Lee with another person's screenplay leads to his tightest, most proficient and purely delightful work in years--he's such a brilliant director, and the restraint of directing on a Brian Glazer project allows his talents to shine.

Most endearing is seeing what it means for Lee to be getting older, or "softer"--Inside Man is a love letter to New York. It's a movie-long sequel to the one memorable part of 25th Hour. Early in that movie (which I found pretty skippable), Monty Brogan has a big obnoxious monologue where he damns New York--fuck the Chelsea boys, fuck the Sikhs, fuck the Italians and Korean grocers. It's tedious, but pays off in the heart-wrenching penultimate sequence of the film. Monty's being driven to jail and finally sees New York, as if for the first time, the beauty shining from each person on the street through his window as he passes.

Inside Man has similar love. It's complex but unalloyed--Spike gives all the characters their moments of grotesquerie, sure--but it's balanced by humanity, kindness, even admiration. Even the Jews. I've never seen Spike so magnanimous. Must come from being a dad or something.

uncle.

2006-03-27T22:28:00.000-08:00

I have never really been a fan (the opposite, actually) of Natalie Portman, but I give. This is just too fucking good--in fact, I would posit that it's the best thing she's ever done or will do.

Rehearsal Photos

2006-03-07T11:04:00.000-08:00

Enjoy!

wash your face and hands

2006-03-05T21:31:00.000-08:00

So I was in a Chinatown dollar store, buying props for the 99-Cent Miss Saigon. We need big bunches of fake money for the show, and as I was wandering about, finding poppers and sparklers, I saw it--tons of fake money, printed on cheap newsprint, bundled beautifully, for about $1.99 per four wrapped stacks. I bought about five of them.

That night, I proudly showed it to my cast. Alexis' face froze. She told me that I had purchased Chinese "Hell Money", joss paper traditionally burned at the grave of dead ancestors. It's bad luck to have it, to keep it, to use it in any flippant or disrespectful way.

I was embarrassed by my basic ignorance, of course--but more than that, I felt the cold pit in my core. I'm only slightly superstitious in my day to day--but terribly more so in the theater. It's "The Scottish Play", and "break a leg" (never, under any circumstances, "good luck"). Whistling in a theater is bad, and any untoward expressions of joy or optimism will net you a three lap run around the theater followed by having to beg to be let back in.

Clearly, this money was bad news and had to be burned. Ben's dad was in town, and told me to burn it to my paternal grandparents, and pray over it--or at the least, send it up with intention.

So we did, tonight. Lined a stock pot in tin foil, set up on our back stairwell in Oakland, and burned it, bundle by bundle. We sent it up to, among others, my paternal grandparents, and Ben's--and various other dead relatives and friends (like my great-great-grandfather, who, in the halcyon years in Vilna before World War II would take my great-aunt Golda to the theater every Shabbat evening).

But mostly, I sent it up to my heroes--my ancestors of the theater: Reza Abdoh and Bert Brecht and all Brecht's female dramaturgs who did most of his work (Elizabeth Hauptman, et al.); Elia Kazan and Gypsy Rose Lee and Richard Pryor and Madeleine Kahn and George M. Cohan and Ron Vawter and Spaulding Gray, the original Thuy in Miss Saigon. And others who have inspired me: Betty Friedan and Susan Sontag, Sam Mockbee (the founder of Rural Studio), and Huey P. Newton and Malcolm X and Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King, Jr. And I sent some money to all of the actors and actresses and chorus kids who struggled and tried to make it and ended up dying with failed dreams in Hemet, or places like it.

The fire looked beautiful--green and blue flames. The paper, as it peeled away in heat and ember, looked variously like anemones and roses, stars and cities and hell itself.

The Heat is On...

2006-02-20T13:07:00.000-08:00

Miss Saigon is live.

V-Day: A Failure of Feminism and Theater

2006-02-16T10:29:00.000-08:00

The basic question: How did Eve Ensler's play, The Vagina Monologues, transform from a downtown New York one-woman show into a worldwide non-profit franchise, with college girls and celebrities alike doing hundreds of benefit performances annually on Valentine's Day (or "V-Day," as it has been designated), “to stop violence against women and girls”?

I see the question as: what does it mean for feminism in this country that young women have canonized a charming if mediocre text, based on interviews with women of their mothers’ generation or older, channeled through narcissistic therapy-speak, and somehow find it an empowering feminist act to recite it verbatim?

Ensler conceives of the question a little differently—"I don't know why I was chosen," she writes in the introduction to the V-Day Edition of the Monologues, before going on to list "vagina miracles, sightings and occurrences": the women who have stormed her dressing room with thanks and tales of sexual trauma; Kathie Lee Gifford and Calista Flockhart chanting vagina for a studio audience; a seventy-year old male viewer announcing, post-show, that “he finally got it.” One gets the sense that if Ensler didn't exist, God would have had to invent her: she was just the divine conduit for the inevitable, the right "vagina lady" at the right time.

I don't mean to be grumpy. Really. Anything that raises money and awareness for women under threat of sexual violence—great, you can't argue with that. God bless Eve Ensler for making the vagina a pop culture phenomenon, worthy of headlines and 72-point font in newspaper ads. And I'll be honest: as hundreds of people can probably attest, I found it incredibly empowering to talk about my vagina and its various uses when I was in college.

But even back then I don't think I found V-Day or the Monologues politically or artistically notable. It’s certainly not in the same league as Anna Deaveare Smith's Fires in the Mirror, a solo performance piece about the 1989 Crown Heights riots. Smith interviewed hundreds of people directly and indirectly involved in the riots, and, in performance, completely transformed herself into her interview subjects, recreating speech and gestures with laser-like specificity, surrendering her performer's body. Instead of presenting a single truth, Smith allowed painful shards of truth to emerge from every subject's story, forcing the audience member to make her own sense of the contradictions, and in doing so, to become aware of her own assumptions—a difficult, radical act.

The Vagina Monologues does not possess nearly the same power—mostly because it does not acknowledge difference. It is meant to be the story of our Collective Vagina. Ensler reports that she interviewed over 200 women of all ages and races and backgrounds for the piece, yet the language, boiled down by her voice, all sounds the same (From the openings of three different monologues: “My vagina’s angry. It is. It’s pissed off.” / “I call it cunt. I’ve reclaimed it, ‘cunt.’ I really like it. ‘Cunt.’” / “I love vaginas. I love women. I do not see them as separate things.”)

The show's original presentation contributed to this sameness, one firmly grounded in Ensler's own body. It's the iconic image of the Monologues: Eve, a white middle-aged woman with a glossy Louise Brooks bob, seated in a chair, her strong arms folded across her lap, wearing a sexy black tank top, lipsticked red lips grazing an erect microphone.

Ensler's interview process seems laden with techniques most appropriate to therapy (asking women, for example, "If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?"). The stories she chooses to tell—an older women finally confessing her lifelong shame over her vagina; a woman discovering her clitoris in vagina encounter workshop; "a wild collective song" of collaged menstruation stories ("I got lost in the bleeding," Ensler writes)—contribute to a play that's more catharsis than conflict. It's a play with an agenda: it wants you to become a Vagina Warrior.

As I wrote about the Medea Project almost two years ago: self-help theater, no matter what it's about, is ultimately reactionary: it allows its audience to participate complacently in the emotional spectacle of "healing," after which they can "feel better." Epic theater is not supposed to make you feel better—it's supposed to distance you from your life, to makes the normal strange by placing everyday experience in its larger sociopolitical context, so you can see it more clearly.

You might argue, as many have, that nothing is stranger than putting the vagina center stage. Arguably, the Monologues did that in 1996, taking an organ swaddled in shame and secrecy and making it the ingénue—a sassy, sweet reversal. It still seems shocking to some campuses, that women would gather to speak about their vagina onstage—vulgar, as some right wingers have put it. It's something that the V-Day Initiative seems quite proud of, even, how much trouble the whole thing stirs up--like every Catholic campus that prevents a production allows Ensler to retain her radical card. Unfortunately, with every year V-Day is celebrated, the entire affair becomes normalized, rote.

Epic theater should also challenge us. The Vagina Monologues don't.

Which is perhaps exactly why young college girls prefer to chant Ensler's cozily therapeutic text as an annual ritual of feminism. It's franchised activism: send in stamps, get a V-Day kit, and you, too, can perform your mother's vaginal empowerment. It's comfortable. Cute. But most of all, it’s safe. Why ask difficult questions about your own sexuality, when Eve Ensler can do it for you?

An acquaintance directed a big benefit production of The Vagina Monologues this year. In an effort to enliven text that sounded stale and seemed like odd drag worn by the bodies of the college aged performers, she attempted to get her actors to think about their relationships with men, sex, their bodies. The young women mostly refused. They giggled and shut down and got defensive and spouted cliches and avoided the question.

I'm reminded of Joan Didion's 1972 essay about the women's movement, in which she critiques the unrealistic desire in feminist literature of the day to paint a picture of woman’s life, post-oppression, as one of fun and ease, independent of "all one's actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it—that sense of living one's deepest life underwater, the dark involvement with blood and birth and death."

Every V-Day, young women buy themselves a pass out of asking themselves the basic questions women need to keep asking, especially in the face of changing realities about women’s health and safety, and shifting messages about our place in society: what does it mean to be bound by our bodies? To be “the Other”? What are we rewarded for in this society? Where does our shame reside—and our desire? What does it mean to seek equality when women’s rights are increasingly spoken of in the past tense?

When one begins to ask these questions, it is hard to stop. The answers often don’t result in comfort—but in anger, sometimes in madness. But both feminism and art require us to test the boundaries of our sanity, of our assumptions; at their best, they demand that we are never content with the status quo. To allow both to stay in the realm of comfortable entertainment does double disservice.

Ensler clearly has a schtick she doesn't mean to change. When one of the actors from the above my friend's production actually attempted to write her own vagina monologue, about the misogyny of her religious background and her own exploration of her sexuality--Ensler called up and reamed the producer out for daring to add anything to her precious text.

Wendy Wasserstein, RIP

2006-02-14T09:55:00.000-08:00

Wendy Wasserstein passed away a couple of weeks ago from cancer. Listening to the story about her on NPR, critics remembered how shocking it was when her plays first came out; no woman had written about negotiating the shockwaves of feminism in a theatrical context, certainly not explicitly if at all. It was a big deal in its moment.

I saw The Heidi Chronicles in New York when I was twelve, and as a teenager fantasized myself in her characters’ confusions. But as I got older, I realized that by performing these plays, I was wearing the drag of feminist concerns that weren’t my own, parroting dialogue that would never be a result of my given circumstances, and characters that simply did not manage to hook onto larger, more universal metaphors. Wasserstein’s plays are set pieces of a specific time. They didn’t age well.

Neither have Christopher Durang's plays. I think the two playwrights were at Yale Drama at the same time--it makes me wonder who the playwrighting teacher was at the moment, who clearly encouraged them to write characters and situations whose desires and shames were so entrenched in their moment, using zingy zany one-liners.

Another piece that has not aged well: The Vagina Monologues, but that's another entry--coming probably within the day.

of the day

2006-01-27T15:35:00.000-08:00

Do not "rehabilitate" the material. That is PC at its worst, the anti-Brecht. It's the easiest impulse.

who knew?

2006-01-18T14:30:00.001-08:00

Daniel Mufson, who authored the authoritative book on the late, great, brilliant director Reza Abdoh, has been running Alternative Theater, a website on the kind of American theater that came out of Lower Manhattan from the late '70s to the late '90s, their European forebears (Brecht, Brecht and more Brecht) and more current colleages.

Of course, "Alternative Theater" is as dated a way to refer to such theater (and their followers) as "avant garde" at this point. My undergraduate teachers being who they were (Marc Robinson, Joseph Roach and Shawn Marie Garrett)--this theater was my apparatus--these artists, my heroes, to whose works I aspired. It's nice to see a home for information about it. The news is rather spottily updated, but there's some great images and history pages.
Check it out.

theater is dead, part 3,492, subsection (a)

2006-01-17T15:02:00.000-08:00

So I guess the question is--if stage actors went on strike, would anyone notice?

theater is dead, part 3,942.

2006-01-15T21:04:00.000-08:00

which is what it feels like. Great article in the New York Times today about how the career of stage acting will make no one no bread at all. Which is to say, duh. But I like that it was a topic of vigorous and pissed-off debate--Tim Blake Nelson said something along the lines of "we are subsidizing the theater," which is true. Theater artists generally aren't paid what they're valued, and subsidize the work they love by other means and other work. Best example in the article:

Andrew Weems gave an explicit example, recalling that some two decades back he'd been in a production of "Troilus and Cressida" in Washington for which the actor playing Thersites had received about $600 a week. Recently Mr. Weems found himself playing the same role, Off Broadway, in a production directed by the esteemed Sir Peter Hall. Mr. Weems was earning significantly less. Another voice chimed in to denounce the disturbing tendency of regional theater management to mimic the latest trends in the corporate world: While the artistic directors' salaries have steadily grown, payments to actors have not kept pace.

On a somewhat unrelated note: a couple of years ago, I had a very illuminating conversation with the husband of Ben's judge, an economics professor, about the state of the art, specifically, of regional theater. I basically told him that the current system in no way facilitated the development of exciting new work; we hashed it out, and ultimately determined that theater has become a museum, showing the same old shit for audiences who wanted it.

"And what's wrong with that?" he asked. I couldn't help but agree. If that's what the regional theater has become, that's what it is, and fin.

Flash forward to convo with colleague yesterday--he was talking about staging a show in a gallery, how it was the most open, inviting space he'd seen. Art galleries love live performance--for fine artists, I've noticed (even in my couple of guest teaching stints with SFAI) that it's sort of this exotic last frontier--both performance and theater--something that sexes up a place.

Theaters are becoming museums. Museums are becoming theaters.

happy new year

2006-01-08T14:08:00.000-08:00

We've begun rehearsal. Of note:

1. I am not looking for a traditional performance space. Just a big empty room. No one with whom I speak seems to understand this (though I tell them this, repeatedly and explicitly). Once I tell them I'm doing a musical, they just talk theater spaces--stages, flies, big lights, big rent. God bless them all. I think I'll tell them we're doing art therapy, or holding AA meetings, as opposed to a show. Only way to get what we need.

2. We're starting the entire process having our actors learn the music--straight singing rehearsals. And all those voices in this room are irresistably thrilling, as I sit here in the corner having the musical director do his thing.

In other notes, Tyler Perry is in Oakland with "Madea Goes To Jail" this weekend--I really, really wish I could go. My kids in Mississippi loved him--traded bad VHS copies of his stage plays--and I've never been.

"For him it is a movie. For us it is our life's tragedy."

2005-12-26T22:14:00.000-08:00

So said one of the widows of the '72 Israeli Olympic team said after watching a special screening of Spielberg's latest, Munich.

It's true: movies are not life. Movies use life. Historical events, life's details and debris, people and personalities, fantasies, intimacies--movies reframe and rearrange life into a visual narrative conveying a select, edited experience (or, as is inevitable for Spielberg, communicating a humanistic homily). Good movies, the best ones, reach their own truth in the process of reframing--the new creation accesses some understanding about the human condition that the assumptions and ruts and general miasma of daily life overwhelm. That's what good movies do.

Most of the reviews about Munich are absorbed by the task of uncovering Spielberg's message—is he pro-Isreal? Pro-Palestine? Morally ambiguous? Relativist? Pro-Peace? What is he trying to say? They miss the point entirely, which is that Munich says nothing, because it is a bad movie.

What is touted as political even-handedness is actually childishly simplistic analysis. The movie is too long, plodding, pointlessly slow; the last hour is a cascade of scenes that all feel like they should be the final scene, none of which, somehow, manage to end the damn movie. The dialogue is lumpen and melodramatic; the events and images cliched*; the "suspense" oddly disconnected; the characters and their psychologies seem two or three steps removed from actual people, as if they were derived from the world of Hollywood characters instead of the world.

But what completely strips Munich of any legitimacy is that it, in no way, traffics in truth: not the truth of historical events, not the truth of governmental or secret service procedure, not the truth of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and especially not the truth of national character (I can only speak for how far they missed the mark on how Israelis think and behave and communicate--and can only guess at similar missteps in portrayals of French and Palestinians).

Screenwriter Tony Kushner, in his epic Angels in America, successfully accessed the big metaphors of human experience through dialogue--because he knew his characters. In his very bones Kushner understands the spoken vernaculars and unspoken nuances of gay America, American Jews, American bureaucracy, various American drags, American fantasies of frontier and power. The script of Munich demonstrates a profound ignorance of what Israelis are like, and a profound ignorance of how Middle Eastern traumas--from military to terror to occupation--manifest themselves in the lives and behaviors of people.

Spielberg acknowledges in the opening credits that the movie is "inspired by true events." But you wonder why he used those events when he seemed so assiduously committed to ignoring all the potent, provocative truths that emerge when such events are researched and explored.

If one is telling a story about an event that happened within our historical memory, it is imperative to sit back, put aside your assumptions of what "the story" is, letting it instead emerge from what the subjects tell you. To be humble enough to be a student to someone else's reality, and then artist enough to reframe the story and return it to them.

Spielberg should have used the Munich story to portray a world in which two peoples, so alike and so divided, perform acts of horrific violence against each other because both find it crucial for their very survival. And no one ever has a moral qualm, because these acts are so necessary--even as they may damage nation and body and psyche. That's the deadlock of the Middle East. That's the damn story. (And by the way--Spielberg would never question the historical necessity of Americans fighting World War II--but of course he can imagine an Israeli Mossad agent wringing his hands over those deaths--what a fucking typical American Jew.)

Oy, Stevie. You've overreached your ability to understand and elucidate history. Go back to making Indiana Jones movies.

*I called the Twin Towers being CGI’d into the background from the very moment the final scene overlooking the East River began.

more dreams

2005-12-19T09:52:00.000-08:00

Last night, in the middle of a longer dream involving bizarre desires between young blonde women and their grizzled, cowboy uncles (Brokeback Mountain? Seven Brides for Seven Brothers? I just don't know)--it turned into a big American theater dream.

The production involved a train, circling through a small town, passing behind an amphitheater like theater. The train would be painted in such a way, and the backdrop arranged, that when the train ran by the theater, it would create a huge fabulous picture/tableaux--oh yeah, also, an actor would hang from the train, and at the moment of tableaux, be Jesus.

It was kind of like a Coen brothers movie, the town--quaint quirky small-town America that was anachronistically multiracial. Me and the guy posing as Jesus passed through the town a couple of times before I smartened up and realized that the actor himself didn't have to hang off the train, just pose and wait for the train. By that time, the train had left for the day.

dreams

2005-12-18T15:47:00.000-08:00

In 1999, I directed Pre-Paradise Sorry Now by Fassbinder, my first play in New York, at the now defunct Present Company Theatorium on Stanton. I loved that show, the process, the cast. One of my cast members asked me if I would direct her in Brilliant Traces, a two-hander from the 80s involving a rugged mountain man whose hermitude gets interrupted by the appearance of a neurotic city-girl in her wedding dress. I said no--the play seemed like clever but facile living room soap opera, and I wasn't interested.

Two weeks after the show closed, I had the following dream:

Pre-Paradise had been extended. I went to see it--and it had been hijacked by these horrible arty schoolmates of mine who had jacked up the "experimental" quotient, having two actors shout to each other in German:

"Mother?!"
"No!"
"Mother?!"
"No!"

I was horrified--left the theater--but now the Present Company was a multi-space complex. The second theater was showing Brilliant Traces. I walked in and watched. The show was being performed true to its nature--as a silly but committed soap opera veering between the ridiculous and supernaturalistic. At one point, when the sexual tension got really hot between the two characters, all these scantily-clad performers began sliding down ropes from the flies, doing a sexy dance-type thing. Backstage, they created a bathroom backstage, part of the set the audience would see but no one else could--for an added touch had three different patterns of white toilet paper--such a precise and careful touch.

I was so impressed--envious, really. "Why didn't I think of that?" I thought, as I watched this play being successful. The play (in my dream, of course) was successful simply by BEING WHAT IT IS--being itself fully, meaning occasionally against or beyond its own conventions.

I woke up thinking--that's what directing is! You figure out exactly what a play is--not what you want it to be, what it is--then just do that. Not interpret over what the text allows, but realize the text--both on its own terms and in a larger context.

I need to keep that in mind as I work through Miss Saigon, which, surprisingly to me, is pretty water-tight. I have to figure out exactly what it is--with both its flaws and successes, and just do that.

La Jolla Playhouse: the straight scoop.

2005-11-16T16:29:00.000-08:00

In another stunning example of the New York Times finding its asshole to be the center of the universe, the following:

"A Tiny Theater in San Diego and Its Director Supply a Steady Flow to Broadway."

Oh, for God's sake. The La Jolla Playhouse is one of the well-regarded theaters in America and has been for years. It's possessed of an enviably upper-middle class subscriber (and potential subscriber) base and some truly committed wealthy donors. Its presence at UCSD spawned what has become one of the most-touted (note I didn't say "best") graduate MFA programs in the country.

Stating that the La Jolla Playhouse is a "tiny non-profit theater" is like George Lucas' infamous self-portrait as an "independent filmmaker from San Francisco" who "doesn't have a lot of resources."

The Playhouse was originally founded in the 1940s by movie stars Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer, who wanted to do upscale summer-stock in the cool San Diego breeze. It was revived in the early 1980s by very rich La Jolla locals (a redundant description, I realize) who wanted San Diego to have some Real Culture.

They hired a young, very talented hot-shot, Des McAnuff, as Artistic Director. He immediately brought stellar people to for the opening season--Peter Sellars, Robert Woodruff--truly, some of the great directors of our time--to do exciting productions (years after the opening season, I heard breathless descriptions of Woodruff's Ajax, which used a deaf actor in the title role, signing, at the end, in a lucite box full of blood.)

I grew up going to the Playhouse during the glory years, when it was holding a fair balance of big fabulous entertainment, awesome guest artists, and even some experimental/complex work. The Playhouse kicked downtown rival The Old Globe's ass in those years, easily--the plays always excited me, challenged me. They made me want to have a life in the American theater.

Then, Des McAnuff, whose increasing reputation and power had also given him increasing access to famous people, convinced Pete Townsend to adapt his rock-opera Tommy to musical theater.

That's when things changed. Anyone around UCSD or the Playhouse at that time would talk about how things were "before Tommy." The show was a blasting success that also blasted the Playhouse into a huge financial hole. Des merrily skipped away from such troubles and headed instead for Hollywood.

A few years, a few troubled Artistic Directors, and a few stinkers later (The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, anyone?), Des returned, with great fanfare and no small relief (it was just never the same without him, really, you could hear the board members whisper).

They've had some mediocre seasons ever since. Des still steadily moves product to Broadway, though of decreasing quality and memorableness (Dracula? Jane Eyre?) My mom, a truly passionate and forgiving theater-goer, is increasingly loathe to throw good money after bad and only grudgingly buys a couple tickets each season when the telemarketers call. Last year, she saw a play she said was the worst she had ever seen--which I would take less seriously except that a close colleague said the same thing. This year, Mom called and told me, wistfully, that another play there was fine, but not a single word in it said anything new.

There's always potential where there's funding and access to talent. The Playhouse has never really had a problem with that, not really, not like true "tiny non-profit theaters" who live and die by one lucky check or one tenacious artistic director living on cheese sandwiches and love. And if ever the LJP didn't deserve a puff piece in the Times, it's now.

why?

2005-10-12T10:14:00.000-07:00

I don't know. I like to not write in this for just long enough that people stop checking. Shocking that I did not advertise here about The Chinese Clown Cabaret, which I directed for this year's SF Fringe Fest. For now, I'm busy:

-Working with middle schoolers at King Junior High School this fall, working with them to create a Living Newspaper.
-Taking a beginning film production class at City College.
-Waiting to hear about certain things, which leaves me in a strained and tense relationship with both the mailbox and the email Inbox.

A few pieces of unfinished business forthcoming.

A Brief Commercial Announcement

2005-07-25T08:41:00.000-07:00

Ben's away for the next couple of months, working on the Roberts nomination for the Alliance for Justice. Contribute to their efforts. Write your senator. He's no middle-of-the-road pragmatist, but a serious conservative with a philosophy and agenda. You heard it here first (all the publications are still trying to bill him as a non-threatening telegenic centrist).

Checking In

2005-07-25T08:23:00.000-07:00

It's been a month, a busy one.

Spent two weeks working again with IMAGES Theater, run by Planned Parenthood of San Diego and Riverside Counties. Blatantly educational theater, of course--it takes a troupe of diverse San Diego teens and over the summer a) trains them to be peer educators and b) has them create theater about issues pertaining to teenagers (STIs, relationship violence, etc.). During the school year, they perform it to high schools all over the county.

My approach, of course, is to try and get them to develop the scenes based on material from their own lives and stories. This year felt especially rewarding, as it's been awhile since I've been really engaged in teaching/facilitating. The cast was a little older, a little more mature, and all very strong performers--ambitious and committed.

Frankly, I don't know how effective it is; not to say it isn't effective--hey, the private funders/supporters (well heeled pro-choice and education San Diegans) always love it. But I've never attended one of their school assemblies, so I really can't say. I think it's a great model, especially as it is a paid position for the kids, and training youth to be able to speak about some of these sticky wickets without shame and with the salient information is always a plus.

It is what it is. It was fun, paid some bills; I believe in the mission of the organization, liked the kids, have a good boss there. For the moment, it's enough (for always, it wouldn't be.)

Welcome, Jerry Langford

2005-06-20T09:04:00.000-07:00

Today, a very special guest writer, taking on the latest from the LA Theater Center, The Crook: A Rehearsal, and by association, all of American pomo theater. Without further ado...

***

A week ago tonight a young woman dragged me to the Los Angeles Theater Center, an opera-house-like chocolate box in the filth of Downtown, a few short blocks away from Skid Row. No longer a producing theatre, LATC houses small rental productions. It is about to be turned into either a corny Shakespeare-for-the-people theatre, or a "Chicano History Museum," depending on who you talk to. In the present moment it's a dowager queen in a shit-stained cardboard box. The most sumptuous and, I might add, most theatrical element of LATC is its lobby, down which one can imagine Gloria Swanson sliding to greet a top-hatted Joe Kennedy many moons ago.

The inside has the unpleasant feel of all the city's Equity-waiver houses: sweat-soaked and junk-food-debris-laden, each one has the texture of a car floor that hasn't been cleaned since 1984. In this sad space, I entered to discover a row of actors sporting costumes from disparate eras sitting on five folding chairs. As the show began (without the dimming of the house lights), we clunked into a faux "rehearsal" of what the program tells us was a post-Civil-War-era blockbuster: "The Black Crook," a melodramatic excuse for can-canny musical numbers. (One would never guess from the production that "Crook" was the "Armageddon" of its age.) In a style unfortunately indebted to the late Reza Abdoh, the "Crook" text was chopped up and handed to the five actors in patterns that morphed and--well, made no sense. Abdoh-ian dance numbers, including one involving dropped pants and self-rump-slapping, interrupted the Reconstruction-era chatter without significantly raising the energy level.

Then the piece de resistance. An actor who resembled Abdoh's muse, the cadaverous Tom Fitzpatrick, materialized to read the words uttered by Jim Jones into a mike before the Guyana massacre. And yes, believe it or not...the cast actually patrolled the aisles and handed the audience...Dixie cups of KOOL-ADE!

To make this long story shorter...seeing this show provoked an experience theatre-makers must know well: that is, the last-straw moment, the epiphany of "I've had it! I can't STAND this stuff any more!"

To make this story even shorter: Here's my contention. Theatre has long ceased to be able to compete with movies and television (and now the Web and video games) as a popular art form. The tricks it can turn are too rarefied, too sensually niggardly to appeal to a mass audience. And quite candidly, the stuff theatre junkies always appeal to as Theatre's Undeniable Essence, as in Maya's friend Deb Margolin's wishful-thinking commencement address, that is to say, the Irreducible Physical Presence of Human Beings, really has little to do with most theatre. It has something to do with the Artaudian gymnastics of Reza Abdoh's shows; or the fascistically regimented group movements of William Forsythe's Frankfurt Ballet; or maybe even the
flopsweat that pours right next to you as Eric Bogosian has a conniption fit
in a small space. But in most of the theatre practiced today, that sentimental favorite, Up-Close and Personal Human Flesh, has little role in the affair. Is there any fundamental difference, let's say, between your local neighborhood production of "Wit" or "Angels in America" and the productions of those plays Mike Nichols directed for HBO--except that Nichols' hand is surer than Joe Yeoman Director's, and the cast is a lot more qualified?

My problem isn't with the Theatre of the Un-Fleshly. Middlebrow problem plays have been with us as long as the McCormick Reaper. If they vanish from your local LORT theatre, they will reappear on "Law and Order" or "The L Word." Lesson-teaching humanism; "observant" psychological portraits; the touching frailties of everyday life; the pleasures of quick-witted journalism--these will always be with us. What's problematic is the other side. The poetic, ecstatic, whites-of-the-eyes-showing, tongues-speaking theatre. The lyric, the larger-than-life. It's this theatre that has let us down.

When I was "growing up," I got into theatre because the period in which I was maturing (the mid-to-late eighties) was one where the cinema, my first love, was at an all-time low ebb. (Film geeks: you have ten seconds to name a great American movie in the span between "Blue Velvet " and "Reservoir Dogs.") It was also a period where the "avant-garde theatre" was at high tide. Great directors like Joanne Akalaitis, Anne Bogart, Richard Foreman, Robert Woodruff, Lee Breuer and Peter Sellars got to tackle the classical canon, not just in a basement in the Bowery, but on the biggest stages of America's regional theatres, in productions that far outpace today's Broadway in scale and spectacle. Breuer staged the last act of Wedekind's "Lulu" on the foley stage of a major motion picture; Akalaitis brought the fifty-character blasphemies of Genet's "The Screens" to the big stage of Minneapolis' Guthrie Theatre (literally dismantling the auditorium's architecture in the process); Foreman staged an NC-17 dadaist farce by the punk novelist Kathy Acker with giant David Salle paintings in a blowout at BAM that suggested a wildly decadent pajama party at Versailles. It seemed like a great time to sign on.

But shortly thereafter, the money for this progressive work dried up. (Ph.D. thesis-ists can speculate as to whether it was Bush 41's recession, the Mapplethorpe scandals, or none-of-the-above.) One thing led to another, and here we are--handing out Dixie cups of pretend Kool-Ade, fantasizing about, but not following through on, putting the audience out of its misery.

I have in recent months started to write about visual art in Los Angeles for an art magazine. I lament that my task consists most times of reviewing empty rooms. I stand in them, I take my notes, I return home to my computer...often months go by before I collide with another spectator. But there is a crucial difference. The circuit of production in the art world goes something like this...

art school > > artist > > dealer > > art press > > collector

Now, somewhere in there, insert "the audience." (I'd say, insert it *after* "collector." Or, if you like, before.) One might think the "collaboration" between the art press and the collectors unholy. And yet it has its benefits. One of them is that the art that sells must pass a certain critical muster. Hoky-shmoky middlebrow stuff that's made to "connect with its audience" would never receive a critical nod, hence would never become "valuable." The academic/art-critical world keeps the standards high and the collecting world keeps the prices high. Ghastly-elitist? Hideously late-capitalist? Maybe; but in acknowledging that it isn't in competition
with the kitsch that Aunt Myrtle puts on the rec-room wall, the American art world has been able to self-select and keep the level of the conversation generally quite high. The art world doesn't pretend to be a friend of Homer Simpson. It is not a populist form as a whole, whatever certain community-minded practitioners may do with it. But in its rarefied way it can evolve toward a very high level of thought and feeling.

Theatre in America, on the other hand, made the mistake of getting down in *what it thought was* the mire. I am reminded of the moment in the 1984 presidential debates when Walter Mondale said, defensively, "Actually, I LIKE President Reagan!"--a concession the natural born winner never felt he had to courteously make to his opponent. Theatre felt it had to compete with TV and movies rather than go it alone and explore its own language courageously. Now, any theatre middlebrow will tell you that's because, by cracky, American theatre is a populist thing--not interested in your Frenchy snobbism, but wanting to get out there and press the flesh with the real
folks! I once had a major artistic director tell me with a straight face that his theatre "was kept honest by our working-class audience." And so what, I asked him, was he offering his working-class audience this month? "Private Lives by Noel Coward," he said without a hint of irony.

No, America's theatre management class has sought to connect with real folks by "telling real stories" and all that rigamarole-y--which means, generally, putting on a cheap version of last year's New York hit, "Wit," "Proof," "Doubt," or some other monosyllabically titled play about cancer, schizophrenia, altar-boy-fondling, learning to drive from a pedophile, or something else topical.

Some of these scripts (particularly the ones by Rebecca Gilman, the uncoronated queen of this genre) are smart, surprising, funny, and rich with un-obvious nuggets of characterization. None of them, of course, can remotely compare in entertainment value with a solid episode of "Law and Order," "The Sopranos," "The West Wing," "The Wire," or some other quasi-journalistic middlebrow fare. Is it that the TV writers and actors are always better? Hardly. The difference is that in a recorded-image medium, the viewer is given a certain kind of sensory relief. We follow Bill Petersen holding a manila folder as he stalks down a hallway, pursuing a germ on a pubic hair, or Martin Sheen as he moves from a limo to the Rotunda. One side of Tony Soprano's phone call takes place in a strip joint, the other in a racetrack. The sheer speed and variety of the image gives even the stodgiest TV program the advantage. This may seem obvious; it's something a survey of eight-year-olds could set straight for you in a minute; and yet somehow, stubbornly, theatre-makers refuse to believe it.

So the only theatre that can be of value is theatre that dispenses with that op-ed-page jive and appeals to our senses of delight in a different way. Surely we have all seen something, whether a Peter Brook minimalist epic or one of Peter Sellars' stripped-down lecture/demo oratorios, where the theatre became a sensorium of exotic debauches for the price of a cup of coffee. The theatre can win not by fighting on "their" terms, but by calmly asserting itself on its own terms. Even a well-acted problem play will never be as captivating as its mass-cult equivalent. But a work of poetic theatre can offer us something any medium's most "accessible" work can't. That is: a pass code to a level of complexity, ambiguity, a richness of language...something one might call, with apologies to John Kerry, Nuance.

I don't need to list off the Biblical scroll of dazzlements that are What Theatre Can Be at Its Best. All I can report is what the "poetic" theatre, the Art theatre, the theatre-that-is-not-hacky-middlebrow-pap, offers us today. It gives us Dixie cups of Kool Ade, and stale quotations. If you live in New York, and are looking at downtown theatre, it's likely that the junk you're watching pallidly apes the Wooster Group and, especially, Richard Foreman. If you live in the boondocks, you will hear words that tinnily echo Mac Wellman and Erik Ehn, and watch bodily contortions that mock Anne Bogart. If you live in Los Angeles, you should really just stay home.

I have spent many evenings in Los Angeles' REDCAT, looking at full-fledge superstars of the avant-garde theatre play to crickets. Or rather, to theatre students (and maybe a few dance majors; and a couple of TA's). Why? Because the American theatre, in trying to play catch-up with movies and TV, has given audiences no context for even the strongest work. A masterpiece like the Wooster Group's "House/Lights" would play to bafflement in most American theatres, as if someone had dropped a Stan Brakhage short between reels of "Revenge of the Sith." It's not that audiences are necessarily blinkered or dumb; it's simply hard to feed a five-course Ethiopian feast to someone who's had PB&J three times a day for the last thirty years. You can't expect delight, only shock and a reach for the security blanket.

There's also something deeper at work. Anyone who's reading this who sees theatre regularly, high, middle or low: Where is the talent migrating? What have you seen in recent years--and be honest here!--that you could make a rational case for as legitimately top-shelf? What writers and directors in the theatre have you encountered who are as thrilling as Charlie Kaufman, P.T. Anderson, David O. Russell, Kimberly Pierce or Steven Soderbergh? Or as insightful or craftsmanly as the makers of the best TV shows you enjoy? Or--let's face it--as pleasure-giving as the pop musicians you love?

Is there some "But on the other hand" upbeat coda to slap on to all this? Not really, except that it's my one-man mission to keep a certain Flame of the Uncoolly Highbrow burning against all odds--because if somebody doesn't keep the guttering flame going, it'll die out for good. If some theatre artist within the sound of my voice reads this and decides to tell me to go fuck myself by making his/her own work, something that refuses to respect my or anyone's codes of what's valid and worthwhile, then maybe there'll be a glimmer of light at the end of this tunnel.

Till then...make that Kool-Ade a double.

why words fail

2005-06-14T09:04:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty down on theater lately. Who cares? Who reads this other than my five friends? (That's fine, btw. xo! Yeah!)

But blogs are created and disseminated and read because of the existence of other blogs about the same thing--news, politics, music, sex. It's a pretty useful case study re: the distribution/dissemination of information and interest. People care because other people care.

And no one cares about theater, and frankly these days, neither do I. Or rather, je t'aime...moi non plus, as a great Frenchman once said.

So, words. I've always had a problem with plays, with doing plays, with scripts, because most of the time I read a script I think, "oh, this is interesting--but what does it need me for?" By the time I read the dramatis personae, I'm done. The world is complete in the words of the script, what do I add to it and why should I care to do so? (Of course, there are exceptions to this). And lately, in my work, I've cared very little about words on stage. Speaking doesn't help me. I have nothing to say.

Deb Margolin, my mentor and friend, just sent me the graduation speech she delivered at a high school for troubled (at risk?) youth. Here's what she said about theater:

Now I’m bringing up theater because it’s the way I know, the way I’ve learned, to express myself in a venue that is both deeply personal and richly communal; I’m bringing up theater because it is one of the most exciting, galvanizing and effective means of social change, and I’m bringing up theater because it is an art form that both celebrates and transcends the failure of language at the same time. Have you noticed that language fails? That you try to express something and your parents just stare at you? And look at me, up here talking all this time! Language brings us as close as we can get to the edges of each other, and then there’s this abyss, the space that separates one mortal soul from another, and from that shore we lament, we reach toward each other in longing.

But theater, see: theater is not just about what’s said, it’s about what cannot be said, it is as much about the subtext of a line, about the silence in a space, as it is about what is said, and so the failure of language is a part of the language of the theater. It’s pretty brilliant. And in the theater, we sit next to others in the dark, and we imagine ourselves, we see ourselves in the people on stage. I mention the theater because it is the only place where you have absolute permission to stare at people. You can’t do it on the bus, you can’t do it on the subway, people have guns in the tristate area. In the theater, we go and stare at people, because theater takes place in the flesh, it is of the body; we stare at the actors and compare ourselves to them, physically, sexually, morally and spiritually. When we have finished watching or presenting a piece of theater; whether we are on the audience’s side or the actor’s side of the curtain, we rise from a sudden community, and we are changed. If we have done our jobs as actors or as citizens of an audience, we are changed.

And Theater takes place not just on stage, either; it takes place in the street, in the classroom; in prisons and homes and community centers and corner delis; those circumstances in which we observe humanity, advance ourselves towards others, and make adjustments in our perceptions of the world from those tender observations, I would posit, are moments of the Theater. And Theater is made not just of “exciting” moments; true theater is a theater of the everyday; a theater in which a single person’s experience is exemplary of conflict and resolution, we do not require a war, or a rape, or a court scene to create humanity or immediacy in the theater. If we are each tiny points at which the entire universe expresses itself, then each of us is enough; our desires, our obsessions, the way we cry when a radio commercial for Car Cash comes on, the way we stare at people’s hands: each of us contains enough drama for a lifetime, and each of us is enough. We need not be any older, taller, thinner, stronger, better or worse looking than we are, to make theater, by which I mean to create recognizable, watchable humanity within a community. I love the theater; make theater with me. If you should wish to do so, call me immediately, my number is xxx-xxx-xxxx*. Just call me.

* In the speech, she read her actual cell phone number.

oh no...

2005-05-27T10:57:00.000-07:00

Announced on IMDB:

While imprisoned in Sing Sing on trumped-up charges, a publicist [played by Sarah Jessica Parker] stages an all-inmate musical.

First, make the decision; then you can agree.

2005-05-25T09:40:00.000-07:00

Warning: this is long. No pictures.

Tuesday, I went to Walden House in the Mission to watch a staged reading of Cracking the Safe, a Soapstone Theater production. Soapstone (a project of Community Works) creates theater in and outside of prisons, bringing together ex-offenders and survivors of violent crimes.

It wasn't that I came with low expectations, but I was pretty sure what to expect. Community-based theater, especially that uses personal or oral history, tends towards first person storytelling, generally spoken directly to the audience. One speaker will come forward. Then another. Over the course of the play, the multiplicity of voices and stories will build to some gestalt, revealing a collective set of truths about its community.

Think Laramie Project, or The Exonerated, or any of Jo Carson's oral history plays. Cracking the Safe didn't stray from that from that model (which, in the past 10 years, has become its own genre with its own apparatus, on which more later). It's rooted in the basic democratic premise that everyone has a story worth sharing about triumph or loss or love or pain.

Is everyone's story interesting? Perhaps. A few weeks ago, I saw a one-man show, Confessions of a Mormon Boy, which, as you might guess, is the story of a gay Mormon man as he grows up, gets married, has children, suffers in the closet, comes out, gets ex-communicated, gets divorced, moves to New York, becomes a gay escort, sex sex drugs drugs, hits bottom and turns his life around.

He's covering a pretty action packed stretch of life here, yeah? You'd think the show would have been, I dunno, interesting or something. But it wasn't. The entire affair was pretty self-indulgent, in that "let me tell you my entire life story in chronological order so it feels like you're experiencing it in real-time" way. He was a man acting out his therapy, not a performer engaged in art-making.

Catharsis is one thing, and of course art, at its best, will be emotionally transformative, but I don't like therapy in my art. (I guess art used in therapy can be ok, though I've never really done that.)

Cracking the Safe certainly was influenced by a therapeutic model. Of course it was--the performers were all Walden House counselors, recovering addicts, and, by their own self-identification, survivors. One man shared childhood memories of his abusive father; another told the tale of a 1969 race riot in the Tracy, California prison. A woman traced rejection by her father to later addiction and abusive relationships; another woman talked about her infant son's death while she was a crack addict. All the artists acknowledged, in their stories, learning to recognize and analyze the causal links between their diverse traumas and resulting patterns of self-destructive behaviors in order to create healthier lives.

Despite this, the play didn't feel like public therapy. The stories were strong and beautifully written--well-structured vignettes of startling specificity, which didn't need any explanation beyond the bare, heartbreaking details. The performers were all present and vulnerable, but told their stories without self-pity or the need for our approval (unlike our Gay Mormon friend; very like the new the Mountain Goats album The Sunset Tree, written in the wake of the death of John Darnielle's abusive step-father).

Of course, a big part of the experience was the context. If a community is a set of people with shared given circumstances, this was genuine community-based theater. The audience was made up almost entirely of the Walden House members, meaning other people in recovery, survivors.

People tend to organize the narratives of their own lives in different ways: by geography, by major events, by relationships. At Walden House, the organizing principal narrative was that of recovery: first trauma (always, first trauma). Then reaction to the trauma through self-destructive behavior, leading to more trauma, hitting a bottom, then the process of recovery and recognizing the relationship between the trauma and negative behaviors.

When director John Warren (mad props, ladies and gents, please) asked the actors to discuss the process of play-making, they did not talk about theater games or automatic writing or talking circles or rehearsal or any of the things that surely happened as they generated and shaped material and came to perform it. They instead discussed the events of their recovery and how it felt to share such information.

The talk-back afterwards was a trip. A comment invariably started with "Hi, my name is [Joe]," and everyone automatically shouted out, "Hi, [Joe]!", and Joe would share the ways he related to certain stories and experiences in the play, in terms of similar traumas and obstacles he had faced or was facing. A lot of naked, honest pain in that room. I kept thinking about the long passages about AA in Infinite Jest.

One of the actors, in response, discussed recovery, describing the point at which, in desperation, he agreed to just do what they told him in AA, without even believing in it, without even believing in sobriety. Do it first, believe it later. Fake it till you make it.

Which brings me back to Brecht, and a Brechtian contradiction. Brecht, in his High Marxist period post-Threepenny, wrote Lehrstücke, or "learning plays," instructional and didactic fables performed by socialist workers choruses and schools in the early 1930s.

A major theme running throughout the Lehrstücke (like "The Measures Taken," "He Who Says Yes/He Who Says No," "The Exception and the Rule," etc.) is that of the Decision (itself the title of Lehrstücke). You have to make the Decision, and the Decision is always: to accept Marxism, communism, the righteous political path--at the expense of individual happiness or expression or weakness.

Brecht's formal innovation of having community participation in these pieces reflected this didactic purpose: first the audience would say the words, (those violent, Marxist, anti-capitalist words)--THEN they could agree. But first you say the words! Make the decision first, then you can believe in it.

But Brecht was doing it in stark opposition to what therapy does. His work was explicitly against the individual: for the greater good of society at the expense, in fact, of individual needs or personalities (a petit bourgeois invention, frivolous in the face of the needs of the revolution). When Boal began doing Theater of the Oppressed, he similarly had an anti-therapy (and anti-soap opera, melodrama) bent. He was interested in community expression as the means of political action, a rehearsal for the revolution. (In his older years, he's married a psychologist and mellowed out about it, but still.) There was no therapy in the art.

Cracking the Safe had a lot of therapy in its art. And this type of community-based theater is often considered to have potential community-healing properties, community therapy on a larger scale, therapy for people engaged. Even though I liked Cracking the Safe, and was moved by the experience, and found it to be without the indulgences of therapy, it left me uncomfortable; I was uneasy on that border between therapy and theater.

After hammering at it, I figured out why. Many practitioners of the art would disagree that's what they're doing, and make the distinct efforts to not be therapy (Michael Rohd, Jo Carson, Anna Deveare Smith, the folks at Cornerstone). But that's how this type of theater is often read, and practiced; it's how community-based theater proliferates. That's how it is understood, that's how people relate to it.

Community-based, educational and therapeutic theater increasingly gets what little arts funding there is in America. It's not funding for theater qua theater; what's being paid for is not the temporal, disappearing play--but the educational tool, that which leaves an artifact of healing, the greater good in the community. We're funding that shadowy end result, not the art.

I find it insidious, another phase of the bourgeois capitalist corruption of art: that there needs to be a product, or commodity on the other side. In this case, community healing becomes the commodity.

adieu, Messr. Poulet Jean

2005-05-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

Sadly, Chicken John ends his stewardship of the Odeon Bar. Tonight, for the last time at the Odeon, see Dr. Hal and Chicken John do their thing, enlightening us all with their great knowledge, possibly communicated in verse.

eating jumble pie

2005-05-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

Not much to report. Haven't seen any plays lately, though I will be soon enough. Right now I'm doing a 5-week Fieldwork Session with The Field SF (an offshoot of The Field NYC), an artist's support organization that holds workshops and programming for performance artists.

It's basically me and nine other performers/dancers/choreographers in a room on Thursdays for about 3 1/2 hours. We show work, then give notes. I performed last week for the first time in, oh, dear, so long it feels like never.

As a director, I'm used to telling actors what to do, or how to do it, and even when working with community-based actors, expect that they'll just do it. It's humbling, in the most useful way, to have to stand in front of an audience, even one of thoughtful, helpful peers, and have to do my thing.

Ramona: Epilogue

2005-05-08T22:12:00.000-07:00

I read Dydia DeLyser’s Ramona Memories--and can highly recommend it. She traces a fascinating history of Southern California through the turn-of-the-century population boom, with the concurrent creation of a California myth, "old California," land of roses and beauty and gracious Spanish living.

Meaning, as a new Southern California was violently exploding into being, tourist and development boosters had to create a romantic mythical past in order to provide some sense of continuity. Ramona and how that novel was read had a big influence on what emerged--especially with the way people so effortlessly mixed fiction with fact. It's truly striking how so many readers, who knew full well Ramona was a novel, would still breathtakingly visit locations of her "marriage" and "birthplace", mixing descriptions of what they saw with events from the story, as if it was real, fusing both in their imaginations. Imagination and fantasy inscribed itself on the landscape as communicated within and without Southern California.

Now, we're left with the Pageant, with its moving picture show of spectacle, serving the same purpose: an culturally undifferentiated, romantic past that leads straight to an inevitable American present. How we want to see that region, and ourselves.

We saw it right before the show started, when the Artistic Director came onstage and asked all the military veterans in the audience to stand and be recognized. Like, they're the reason we're doing this show.

We saw it in the California Historical plaques sprinkling the perimeter of the theater, proclaiming that this valley area had worth not only because here "was laid part of the scene and here resided a number of the characters" presented in the novel Ramona, but because they'd been performing that fiction in pageant form since 1923, the performance itself taking on the gloss and sheen of history.

We saw it in 200 local kids, mostly white, dressing as Injuns and standing in the landscape, receiving their due, inheriting the chapparal-covered earth.

Mother's Day in the Bay

2005-05-07T10:18:00.000-07:00

Jane Chen and her mom Tair do their fabulous Chinese Clown Cabaret show at the Asian Art Museum on Sunday at 12:30pm. Don't ask questions--just go.

Ramona: The Pageant! (Two)

2005-05-06T17:36:00.000-07:00

Notable about the musical numbers was the utter conflation of all cultural distinctions into sameness.

The dance sequence at the hacienda, for example, features all sorts of dance—high Spanish flamenco and cape dances, early 19th-century European partner dancing (with castanets?!), fancy folklorico footwork, all punctuated by gunshots and olés and rope tricks. It wasn't from the time--but from an imaginary Spanish/Mexican past, where there were no distinctions between classes, or californios and Spaniards and mestizo Mexicans.

The Indian dance sequence followed with a montage of traditional dance from tribes who never stepped a wee moccasin in this part of the world. We saw fancy dancing and hoop dance and grass dance—and while the program noted from which tribes these dances emerged, it was without of acknowledgement that Native American tribes were different peoples entirely, with different traditions and cultures and languages, their most binding commonality being the manner in which they all were royally screwed by European invaders.

Not only have the richly diverse and complex Spanish-speaking and Native American populations been melded down into one thing each—the two populations themselves are conflated with blithe ignorance. Meaning, the brown people speak and sound and look pretty much the same. Check it—the four young men who did the drumming for the Indian dances looked like honest to God SoCal ese vatos. Also, a Spanish accent is used by indios and californios interchangeably.

Spanish as a language appears in the script entirely for exclamations and ejections and as tag ends of sentences to remind us that hey! they spoke Spanish. Ah, the old days. It was a Spanishy time.

In this version of reality, it's the californios and indios verses the encroaching americanos: "Since the americanos have come and under the new laws, no one can call his land his own,” says Mr. Exposition, skipping the part about how local indigenous peoples hadn't called the land their own from the conquista onwards through the Mission fathers and the californios.

(FYI: americanos, in case you were wondering, weren't bad people for taking Indian and californio land—they simply had no choice, as they were trying to do right by their families. Sure, there were a few bad apples, but most of the white settlers were racked with resigned regret).

Details? Whatever. The pageant melts difference down and forges a mythology of a common Southern Californian heritage through our shared enjoyment, our shared pleasure in spectacle. At one point, we may have been separate, but our fates always were connected; we were always manifestly destined to be here together as Americans.

The mythology gains authenticity through the final, if not the ultimate, spectacle in the show. It’s not the singing or the dancing. It’s the people.

And that, my friends, is what struck me by the end of the pageant: the main event of Ramona comes from watching lots of bodies onstage, and those bodies onstage in the wide stretch of nature.

Ramona opened with the “traditional annual procession,” which is nothing more than the cast making a simple stage cross. But the cast has over 400 members, including 200 local kids. Wearing colorful Mexican dresses or in Injun loincloths, or set up as cowboys on horseback and carrying flags—they all emerge from the bushes stage right and march slowly across. The cast is thick on the footpath, colorful and bright, and the procession just lasts and lasts, while the audience gasps and laughs and points at the cute little kids. The opening has no purpose in the show except for that.

In the first act at the hacienda, opportunities for scenes of dramatic import or transition are instead used to shoe-horn in large group scenes of little kid hijinks. And both dance numbers are as much for the people not dancing, crowding the stage in costume and number, as for the main performers.

The Indian dance number culminated in a prayer to the four winds or nature gods or whatever (because all Native Americans worshipped the same gods in the same way, of course). The forty performers onstage who have been dancing turn to all four corners, and reach up to the sky and the earth and whatever—and suddenly they’re facing upstage, looking at the big foothill stage right, when:

From behind trees and rocks and corners you never even expected to look, at least 80 actors in “native” garb emerge. With the late afternoon light hitting their bodies, suddenly the flat pastoral plane of nature gains depth and movement—everyone gasps, and looks for more life in the landscape, and everywhere you look, there are more—crouching and standing, the silhouettes of at least twenty lining the top of the high hill, just being there. It’s a breathtaking sight.

It’s as if, by placing these bodies enacting life on the familiar California chaparral scrub brush hills, we are seeing the real past.

Simultaneous with the play’s action, throughout the big dramatic scenes, they have Indians (children and adults) “living” and playing in Indian huts stationed upstage and opposite from the hacienda, in the foothills. The stage focus never goes to them, so it creates an illusion of seeing things as they were.

We get the delicious shock of watching people actually walk through the hills—when the Padre leaves the hacienda, he really hikes away. It actually takes a while for him to get offstage to where we can’t see him—which makes it so much realer. Later in the show, cowboys on horses descend from the tip top of the foothills, the horses picking their way through steep and narrow paths. At the very end, when Alessandro is killed, a man on horseback shoots him from across the stage—and we watch Alessandro roll down. Left on the rock near where he was standing when shot, we see a large smear of very real-looking blood.

Ramona: The Pageant! (One)

2005-05-04T07:50:00.000-07:00

The Ramona Pageant has basis in Helen Hunt Jackson's book, of course—and the script distills the novel into its major events quite concisely:

Ramona and Alessandro (a) meet, (b) fall in love, (c) run away together, (d) bear a child, and (e) get in trouble with the white people, leading to, (f) Alessandro’s death.

Note how the old ad promises a show that “features incidents” from the novel. One event doesn’t develop into another; instead, each incident emerges with fan-fared separateness: a burst of live trumpet opens and closes each act; the beginning and end of each scene demarcated with the ringing of an “old ranch bell.” The incidents are sewn together with big chunks of Mr. Exposition-style dialogue, plot-establishing lines like, "After all, he is only an Indian, por supuesto,” and “Alessandro went home to see his father a month ago, and Ramona is getting sadder and sadder.”

Wrapping around the skeletal body of plot information, we have the muscle and connective tissue of moving pictures: dance, music, bodies on stage and melodramatic acting.

The last is the easiest to mock, but let’s be fair: it’s hard to turn in good acting in this type of situation. Psychological subtleties and fine shades and delicate comedic turns and quiet agonies—characters that ring with any truth beyond one note, really—those things simply don’t read on a stage this big and exposed, what, with the bugs and traffic noises, the actors' voices picked up by a couple of standing microphones wrapped in bougainvillea stage center.[1]

The actors are stranded with nothing to swing them from big emotional peak to big emotional peak but a bad script and their own histrionics. The florid exclamatory performances become their own spectacle: “I do not offer my services for wages!” (what, then, does he work for?) “Your Indian Lover is gone!” "As long as I never see a white man again!" ("Word," said Ben). It didn't seem like the director probably even tried to get passable performance out of these actors.

This was initially off-putting to me, and I spent the first few scenes grumpily scribbling down notes straight out of Directing 101:

If the script calls for someone to mention how noisy the house is, you should probably start that noise before he says his line and not after.
If the clownish "old farmhand" character has a broken leg, then even while being comically chased about by the hot-tempered fat old maid (Pat's daughter, if you remember), he shouldn’t be able to scramble about so youthfully and handily—plus, he should probably decide just which leg is broken and stick to it.
If Margarita, the sexy sassy servant daughter of the above maid, is supposed to be a MAID, she probably wouldn't come out wearing a new dress in every scene.

But the mistake was mine—and my notes mattered exactly nil. This isn’t a play about accurately nailing class differences—it isn’t a play. Margarita wears a different dress in every scene because she's the sexy taste in the moving picture show—the yummy flirty eye-candy.

Not that story and spectacle aren't connected: both of the extended musical sequences (of which there are two), get justified within the plot structure. In the middle of Act One, the Senora holds a fiesta at the hacienda, which necessitates a good half hour of dancing; Act Two opens with all the Indians coming together to celebrate the birth of Ramona and Alessandro's child.

But again, the plot isn't the story, the spectacle is the story. And looking at it that way, the song and dance montages bear the heaviest dramatic weight: the most time used onstage, the most stage used at one time, the most performers, the longest curatorial notes in the program.

There’s a palpable sense of relief when we get to the first dance number. It’s like we’ve waded through all that darn plot and story, even boiled down as it is, and it’s hard work. Pairs and threes of actors, at sea on a stage the size of a football field, straining their voices and dramatic abilities to hold our attention; audiences, straining to stay interested and pretend sympathy with Ramona and Alessandro.

And then two servants cross the stage with a stuffed deer hanging upside down from a long pole (the men were out hunting, you see), and everyone cries “fiesta!” and dozens of actors pour out onstage, all in colorful costumes;—and now we can just relax and have a good time. The pressure is off. The characters cease being characters and become emcees, entertainers, facilitating the big party.

[1] The sound emerges from a huge speaker parked front and center in the stage, unsuccessfully swathed in green cloth and covered with a potted plant.